[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