[bad_user]

Are you sure you replied to the right comment? :-)

From my point of view, an interview really isn't an exchange between equals, but a meetup where two parties meet, state their demands and evaluate each other. It works in both directions of course.

[stegosaurus]

Yes, I am.

>> From my point of view, an interview really isn't an exchange between equals

If you design it that way, sure. It doesn't have to be like that.

The whole principle here is that there exists a growing portion of developers who can't be bothered with interview ping pong.

If you don't want them, great! Everyone wins. You don't need to convince us, we won't be working at your company anyway.

[bad_user]

So first of all, I'm not hiring :-P I see your point though and I don't agree.

First of all, the point of the interview isn't to determine whether somebody is bad, or improperly couched. Surely interviewers would love being able to do that, but it's not possible to do it in a couple of hours.

During the interview all you get to do is to apply a noise filter to get rid of the incredibly bad ones. Because without that filter you can get people that are a very bad fit and that can cost you the project and the morale of your existing employees. It's incredibly taxing to fire somebody. Every time it happened to see a colleague being fired, internal discussions, personal attacks and bad feelings happened internally, every single time and not just at one company. And then in big corporations, because of the risks involved in firing people, you get an even worse effect - you see them "promoted".

And with a noise filter you can naturally have many, many false negatives, as in people that are in fact good, but won't pass the test and interviewers are willing to have that risk, instead of risking false positives.

Of course, from what you're saying, I think you believe everybody can be great. Well, yeah, I think everybody can be great at something useful, but not everybody can be great at something specific. We software developers are too idealistic at times. I don't see surgeons going around telling other people that everybody can be a surgeon. That would be a preposterous thing to say.

On the other hand I do think that if companies want good people, they should invest in education.

> The whole principle here is that there exists a growing portion of developers who can't be bothered with interview ping pong.

I can agree with that. I'm not into interviewing myself. I'm not into switching jobs that often either. I can't be bothered with that because I've got satisfying things to work on already. Capitalism and the free market cuts both ways, right?