[dsacco]

I really don't think you can declare that any success of the process is due to chance or "other factors." That particular point is completely unsubstantiated. The process is inefficient, yes, but I really don't see any basis to call it meaningless except for personal dislike.

Even if the process is inefficient (many false negatives), if it yields a population with fewer false positives than the general population it is meaningful. This is an important distinction because many people seem to be unilaterally declaring these hiring practices to be useful due to dislike and anecdata. Of course they're not ideal and there is a lot of room for improvement, but there's no empirical reason for us to act as though the entire system is arbitrary just because we don't like it.

The primary question we should be looking at to inject some empiricism into this discussion is how many engineers end up being fired once hired, how long it takes to fill each technical role on average and how many candidates are turned down. There seens to be a false dichotomy at play, where people are only able to damn the process in its entirety, but it can still be bad and retain some signal. That shouldn't be a controversial point, it should be a minor preliminary observation.

[ubernostrum]

Again: the metrics being measured in typical tech interview processes are not the same metrics those same companies would use to measure success on the job. They are not useful predictors of success or failure on the job.

If the interview metrics are that disconnected, there is no meaning to the interview metrics.

[dsacco]

But even if the metrics are not the same, they can still be positively correlated with each other.