[courtf]

I love these anecdotes, thank you!

The greatest programmer I've had the privilege of working closely with could easily pass most technical screens, but he's an odd fellow, and I don't think could handle the stress and anxiety of these crazy interviews. Lots of diamonds in the rough out there, but I suppose large companies understand that and just consider it acceptable loss.

[wutbrodo]

That's what every bitter HN comment on the topic forgets. If Larry Page could sit down and talk to each candidate, I'm sure he'd be able to properly assess these kinds of corner cases. The challenge isn't being able to do that at an individual level; it's being able to do it in a way that's somewhat consistent and scalable across tens of thousands of interviewers and millions of candidates. Any large system is going to have false positives and negatives, and hiring is broken to begin with at most companies (assessing whether someone will be a good employee for the next few years based on a few short meetings is really hard)

[TheSpiceIsLife]

> assessing whether someone will be a good employee for the next few years based on a few short meetings is really hard

Predicting the future is very difficult, and therefore probably not what interviews are designed to optimise for.

Interviews probably optimise for something like: The candidate seemed like a reasonable choice at the time / cover-your-arse scenario.

[wutbrodo]

Predicting the future is what you're trying to do when hiring, for which interviews are a specific tool.

[AlexCoventry]

There must be people who'd want to specialize in that, though, if it's possible. It sounds like a fun job.

[wutbrodo]

That's still waving away the difficulty of taking an entity's goal and losslessly/consistently distributing it into thousands of individuals. It's just not a possible task.