| Technical interviews are a glaring example of a problem we don't really recognize: being stereotypically "male technical smart" is a disability. Having smart people try to determine if another person matches their same definition of "smartness" is fraught with peril. There are a dozen dimensions to "smartness," and not everybody aligns properly. It's similar to the quote "You have to be twice as smart to fix broken code as you were when you wrote it." Extremely clever code with bugs is provably unfixable. Extremely clever interviews are almost provably bad filter criteria. But, in the context of interviewing, evaluating _a person_ isn't the same as evaluating _their immediate output_. Evaluating the future output of a person isn't the same as evaluating "can this person replicate intro-to-CS exercises they haven't touched in 12 years?" Correct interviews require, gasp, strong compassionate people skills in addition to domain knowledge where you can challenge candidates. You've always got to figure out what they actually know versus what they think they know versus what they say they can do versus what they can actually do. Then there's an entire other issue of "Smart People" versus "Capable People." Most people in power end up being "smart," but not necessarily capable any longer (by "failing upward" and now having magic protections). Some people end up being decision makers with little actual creation responsibilities (read: anything they could actually be judged against), so they are free to just be amazing with little detriment for their decisions. But, sometimes you need a number of "smart but not capable" people to balance out half a company being head-down technically but not necessarily aware of larger issues plaguing them. (Did I just invent managers?) |