I disagree. This taps into a lot of technical know-how and communication skills.
It’s a well-rounded examination of how someone can contribute to the development of a product. That such a well-rounded assessment happens to include examining your likability or “other emotional response” is just a byproduct of testing how well someone interfaces with other humans - part of the job almost always.
The grandposter actually doesn't say "social skills" are worthless. You're kinda putting words into their mouth. They only claim that that type of interview is biased for one factor.
"Culture fit" is one of those things that seems to be used as a proxy for traits that are illegal to take into consideration during the hiring process.
At its worst case, sure. But it also means, can I work with this person? Can we be productive together? Are they picking up what I and the rest of the team will be throwing down?
Everyone has had to do a terrible group project in school where the group dynamic was just not there and the whole thing suffered, despite all the smarts being at the table. This is to attempt to avoid that exact same thing from happening, because often you just don't have the time to flub around telling someone how to document something properly for the 10th time.
We recently spent a long time filling a position. We're a relatively small team, where it is paramount that one works well with the rest of the team.
That doesn't mean you got to fit some tight social profile, far from it.
But since we're a small team each person has a lot of responsibility, and so we need to trust the right decisions are made for the right reasons, that communication won't be an issue, that you can handle dealing with customers for projects and troubleshooting etc.
We don't need the best skilled coders. We need developers who're good at finding solutions to our customers problems, within the constraints of us being a small team with limited resources (time most of all). We need someone who's capable of learning new technologies as the needs arise, and we need someone who can communicate well within the team and with our customers.
When I got hired, my actual coding skill wasn't really a topic. I didn't get a single programming quiz or similar question. They were far more interested in my background, what sort of projects I had been working on, what motivated me etc.
I can understand this concern though I can assure you when I say "culture fit" I'm considering it a two way street.
A good example: I had an interview earlier this week for a full-stack role and the inteviewee had recently come off a two year project that was heavy on react. The project he'd be on has a jquery frontend. I told him candidly that the project would likely never make a "modern" refactor a priority, and asked him if he could still be happy in a role that used jquery.
Our full-time team is small and ensuring we can all collaborate and work together is very important for us to be effective. On the flip side we try to be transparent about what our team looks like too and give you a chance to decide if you could be locked in a room, hashing out which circle talks to which on a whiteboard, with us.
It’s a well-rounded examination of how someone can contribute to the development of a product. That such a well-rounded assessment happens to include examining your likability or “other emotional response” is just a byproduct of testing how well someone interfaces with other humans - part of the job almost always.