[ubersoldat2k7]

What I find interesting is that, on one end, there's a "developers" shortage, but on the other, all companies are funneling potentially good engineers through processes designed for the "interview" experts. Also, that AMZ or Google do open public positions is weird. I'm pretty sure they could have the best referring programs.

[gaius]

on one end, there's a "developers" shortage, but on the other, all companies are funneling potentially good engineers through processes designed for the "interview" experts.

If there genuinely was a shortage could any company get away with these ridiculous practices? It only makes sense if there is both a glut of candidates and of existing employees with lots of free time on their hands.

During the dotcom boom when there was a genuine shortage an interview was a phone screen, a couple of hours onsite then “when can you start?”. Companies couldn’t shovel workers in the door fast enough!

[clarry]

The big companies that do this have no shortage. They can afford to be as picky as they want and people are still drooling for a job at these places.

There's still genuine shortage around, but it's by no means universal. Smaller companies are affected more, but they can't afford to shovel workers in like the big companies once could. And it's pretty likely that they are the ones that get hurt the most if they get a bad hire, so they are in a dire situation. The likes of google, facebook and amazon can easily soak up a bunch of bad hires until they realize the problem and show them the door.

[gaius]

Plenty of smaller companies cargo-cult those kinds of practices, and the matter wasn't helped by hyperbole from the likes of Spolskey saying one bad hire can destroy your company (while noone wondered why the top developers in the world would be flocking to work on his dumb project management tool). No other industry makes such a song-and-dance of hiring as tech, insists that people do the job as a hobby in their spare time too, etc etc

[dmarucco]

Actually there's a lot of "did three months <put language or framework here> course and now I am a ninja programmer!" candidates. So those interview processes are designed to understand if you belong to that category, but they are far from perfection.

In my personal experience, referral programs are the best.

[bufferoverflow]

What other realistic option is there besides interviewing?

[Bayart]

The Thunderdome.

[andybak]

It's about good interviewing and bad interviewing. I dream of a day when the skills tested are close to those needed for a role and a willingness to parrot "Leadership Principles" is seen as a red flag rather than a badge of merit.