[seankimdesign]

I think I read something a while back from the point-of-view of a Google recruiter or someone that described their reasoning for this. The reality is that most companies are okay with the possibility of rejecting a good engineer who has all the potential to be a good fit for them. There's really no shortage of candidates who want to work for them, so they are okay with false negatives as long as engineers are still lining up to interview for them. What they aren't okay with, however, is the possibility of accidentally accepting a bad engineer: a problem which is quite costly to remedy.

The current state of algorithm-heavy interview process is really just a hamfisted solution to the problem stated above. They are trying to minimize false-positives while accepting that it increases the rate of false-negatives, and their proxy for implementing this threshold is algorithmic knowledge. It's not fun for anyone involved, but I guess I have to assume it works.