[UncleOxidant]

Are you sure that many resumes of qualified candidates aren't screened out prior to making it to your desk? Hiring websites are awful. And there's absolutely no quality control - how do you even know who's not making it through who probably should be? Is anybody actually doing that kind of testing?

> (The median interview candidate is much, much worse than the median engineer because the worse you interview, the more frequently you show up on interview loops.)

Not sure I understand what you're saying here. People who haven't needed to interview in a long time are probably not good at interviewing but good engineers nonetheless. Conversely, people who are good at interviewing might be because they've had a lot of practice.

[sokoloff]

If you assume some correlation, even imperfect, between SWE effectiveness and interview performance, the least effective SWEs are likely to both be looking for work more often and require more interviews per successful job search, so will be way over-represented in the “who applies to interview” pool.

Joel Spolsky said it well: “A lot of companies think they're hiring the top 1 percent because they get 100 resumés for every open position. They're kidding themselves. When you fill an opening, think about what happens to the 99 people you turn away. They don't give up and go into plumbing. They apply for another job. There's a floating population of applicants in your industry that apply for nearly every opening posted online, even though many of them are qualified for virtually none of these positions.“