[jesse__]

Meh .. I've played that game; it doesn't work out well for anyone involved.

I optimize my answers for the companies I want to work for, and get rejected by the ones I don't. The hardest part of that strategy is coming to terms with the idea that I constantly get rejected by people that I think are mostly <derogatory_words_here>, but I've developed thick skin over the years.

I'd much rather spend a year unemployed (and do a ton of painful interviews) and find a company who's values align with mine, than work for a year on a team I disagree with constantly and quit out of frustration.

[bauerd]

The company's values may align to yours, even though they reject you. It's because the interview process doesn't need to have anything to do with their real-world process. Their engineers probe you for the same "best practices" that they themselves were constantly probed for in their own interviews. Interviewing is its very own skill that doesn't necessarily translate into real-life performance.

[jesse__]

I agree with your observation. My issue is (from experience) it's really hard to tell from the outside if a teams' values align with mine. Many teams talk the talk, but don't walk the walk, as the saying goes. It's just easier to not participate than it is to guess, and be wrong.

I also believe that running a broken interview process actively selects for qualities you actually don't want, so it's much more likely that teams conducting those interviews aren't teams I want to work on.

Edit: As credence for my claims, the best team I've ever worked on was a team I did 90%+ of the hiring for, and we didn't do any of the 'typical' interview bullshit most companies do.

What we did instead was sit people down and have deep technical conversations about systems they'd worked on in the past. The candidate would explain, in as much detail as they could muster, a system they'd worked on in the past, down to the lowest level details. Usually, they would talk to us for at least 20-30 minutes, then, we (the interviewers) would pose questions, usually starting with the form 'if we changed X, what effect would it have'. Doing interviews in this style make a few things immediately obvious:

1. Did the candidate have a deep, systemic understanding of the system they worked on?

2. Does the candidate have a good mental model for evaluating change in the system?

That's how I conduct interviews, and unsurprisingly, when I get interviewed like that, my success rate is 100%. I don't think I've ever done an interview like that which did not result in an offer.

Anyways, there's some rambling and unsolicited opinions for you :)

[wat10000]

The interview process determines who gets hired, which determines their real-world process. Even if most of their people were hired under a better system, future hires will come in under this one.