[mlevental]

> The penalty is paid by the candidate, and the company will usually go along just fine, but it is a sad broken system for a lot of qualified people.

i don't understand how people don't get it: if this were a malfunctioning system companies' margins/bottom lines would be affected and they would correct course. the fact that not only does this trend persist but grows signals that it's actually effective.

[reallydontask]

This is pretty naive.

A company I used to work at made ~$10Bn in profit per year and employed 300k people this does not mean that all its practices were profit making, some were demonstrably not profit making, even admitted to be so by SVPs. I don't mean some investment that would pay off in the future, I mean cost cutting exercises that went so far as to go past the fat and into the bone (SVPs words when we got a new CEO)

Another company I used to work at, this one employing 20 people, had a shockingly bad product. It looked dated, it was slow and it had all manner of process issues, in a word: Dysfunctional. The company was pretty profitable as it had excellent sales people. Working here really made me question a lot of things. How could a company with such a shitty, outdated, slow and unmaintainable product be so successful (for its size)?

The point is that the relationship between qualified people and financial success is far from linear.

[sgift]

If this were correct startups wouldn't have a chance to dethrone an incumbent, because companies would adjust course long before.

The thing is: Some people may even see this. But then they have to convince their boss. And maybe that boss has to convince their own boss. Or HR. Or both. And then you get into "but does this mean a part of our workforce is incompetent" territory and so on.

Something doesn't get corrected just because it affects the bottom line. Someone has to fight for it and with a topic like that you probably won't win many friends by doing it.

[clarry]

Assuming companies are omniscient..

I suspect it's really difficult to tell from within whether your bottom line is being hurt or helped by the interview process.

The effects are not immediate, and you rarely have the possibility to see how the numbers would've looked if you had done everything differently.. of course, that goes both ways.

[crdoconnor]

There's a lot of luck and a lot of pareto distributions for software development. There is no straightforward relationship between effectiveness and profit like there is for other careers (e.g. sales).