[slurgfest]

Hiring practices of Google and Amazon are very unrepresentative of smaller companies and more heavily emphasize general intelligence, prestigious background and background in computer science. As you say, it's about the process of working a problem more than experience with specific tools.

However, most companies are smaller than Google and Amazon and have different practices. Sometimes, stupid practices, because the interviewers don't really know how to do it, just want to get it over with, or really care about things which aren't important.

But since they are in the hiring position and assume they and their company are awesome, they are not so likely to question their own technical or interviewing abilities and certainly don't want to hear what interviewees have to say about it.

You need additional insights beyond just doing the job to understand what makes someone else useful in that job. And if you don't even have that much, you are guaranteed to ask stupid questions and end up with people selected for how good they are at selling and how much you think they're cool.