[hlmencken]

Being a manager and hirer is very different from being the interviewee. It's great to believe that you could have some innate ability to judge one's empathy and character in a set of interviews but so much of that runs to favor people who can talk well, which is a wholly different skill from being to code well. Saying technical interviews are disguised IQ tests is quite the horse-shit metaphor. I won't dig into all the problems with IQ tests. Certainly some people have innate ability to do well in quantitative tests, but I know so many people who have put in so much work to get so good at what they do against difficulty and belittling their success at interviewing as something inherent like IQ is awful. Getting to that level takes experience. It takes grit. Programming is a highly technical skill, I have worked with people I don't get along with and people I can't talk to comfortably who have written amazing code and when I am reviewing code that is going to be depended upon by millions of people each day I will always merge good code over someone I like personally. Lots of developers also have responsibilities that use empathy and character and leadership and those people you should always hire along that rubric as well, but if what you need is strong technical skill and ability to solve hard problems with code. You have to find someone who can program well; after that you can have a lot of flexibility in how you work with them and what other responsibilities you give them. I think you are off in comparing programmers to white collar professions. Compare them to skilled professions ala crane operators, machinists, or surgeons. If you don't have hard technical problems then you have the luxury of not needing people who are very good technically, so you can have the luxury of rounding out your interview, but if you have programs for which code quality is very important, you should trust someone who can build good software.