[engmgrmgr]

Many people also don’t do well in high stakes problem solving situations even when not being watched.

I’m not suggesting OP is dumb, but if someone is setting hiring criteria and thinks they need X skillset judged by Y, I think there’s a good chance they’re directionally correct.

I get it, I’ve bombed interviews I was excited about and rationalized it anywhere and everywhere. Once I started hiring folks, my opinions evolved significantly.

How else do you hire someone out of a pool of people that are all knowledgeable and likable? A bad hire, even if they’re super smart and just the wrong fit, is worse than not hiring anyone at all.

If you climb the management ladder, you’ll likely be graded on your org’s hiring outcomes. If 10 people all seemed qualified, I’m going to burn down the risk as much as possible. If I’m wrong 1 time for this, but it not obviously wrong 9 others, I’ll call it a win.

For context: this is coming from tiny startups to billion dollar companies and different things in between.

[notacoward]

What if there's solid evidence (e.g. visible work in open source) that all ten can code? The problem is not that coding interviews exist at all but that they're mandatory for all levels and roles. At L5+ coding isn't even the most important skill, so LC-style coding interviews introduce a risk of false negatives without providing any actually useful information. BTW those false negatives occur disproportionately for some demographics, and it only takes a single mention of "culture fit" to make one wonder if that's the whole point.