[ozgung]

This illustrates why it's a terrible idea to work in a large corporation where the hiring process is managed by an HR department. The process is optimized for filtering out people. The reason why the job postings and interview questions seem to expect unrealistically high standards has nothing to do with the actual jobs requiring any of those high standards. In reality those jobs tend to be very dull and standard.

Tech start-ups and good engineering teams ask a different question: "What value this talented engineer can provide to our team or product?" Their job is not to stop people getting hired. Their job is to convert the available Human Resource to economic value as much as they can.

As far as I know hiring decisions made only by HR departments don't perform any better than randomly hiring one of those 100 candidates. Actually random is better if you really need the absolute best candidates because HR process has a high risk of filtering them out at the initial stage carried out by a clueless junior HR staff. But it's OK for the HR's sake since their actual purpose is to stop people getting hired.