[jfb]

This. A few times at Apple a real disaster would make it through the phone screen, and there would be a panic about what to do. Usually we just went through with it, but it always seemed to me to be more respectful to the candidate and the interviewing team to just pull the chute as soon as it was obvious.

The real answer of course was to fix the phone screens, but that requires actual energy be put into thinking hard about the hiring process, and the hiring process is deeply, fundamentally unsexy.

[toomuchcoffee]

Also, many of these "disaster" cases may simply be suffering from an unfortunate, but all too human cases of stage fright, especially if it's their first F2F at a big company like Apple. Some people just freeze up involuntarily, and trip all over their tongues when being grilled by people they look up to and respect. They're human beings, not quiz-answering machines, after all.

Not that we need to slow down and make some kind of special accommodation when this happens -- because indeed, such episodes may fairly be viewed as signs of a lack of experience and confidence.

But it still surprises me how often people fail to see the basic humanity at play in these situations: instead of thinking "poor guy, he seemed really nervous", all that comes to mind is "What a loser! He couldn't solve that Euler problem with me staring and grinning impatiently at him the whole time. How did he ever make it through the phone screen?"

[jfb]

"Also, many of these "disaster" cases may simply be suffering from an unfortunate, but all too human cases of stage fright, especially if it's their first F2F at a big company like Apple."

This is absolutely correct, and there's no hard and fast set of rules to determine if performance in a staged, artificial environment like an interview correlates in any significant way with performance at the job intended. There're a whole host of issues around hiring in particular and coping with humans in general that the tech industry does an astonishingly bad job with.

To me, the goal of interviewing is not to find someone who is a clone of someone who already is on the team, but rather to find someone who brings different and useful perspectives to the job. If they can work on existing problems day one, so much the better, but if they can never get beyond working on existing problems, then they were a mis-hire.

[toomuchcoffee]

Of course you can always abort the on-site interview early. You don't even have to give a reason, necessarily.

But there's no point to giving a transparently dishonest, "the dog at my homework"-style response, like was apparently done at Twitter in the two occasions cited above.

[jfb]

If I ever heard that piss-weak excuse in an interview ("we can't find the interviewers"? for serious?), I'd be gone regardless. If it's a dodge, it's dishonest and cowardly, and if it's true it displays a shocking degree of disrespect. Either would mean that the culture of the interviewing company was irreparably broken and that I wouldn't be happy there.