Interviewing is hard and (afaik) most companies do very little to train their employees to be decent interviewers.
Add to that the fact that many people see interviewing as a distraction from their regular work rather than as an important investment in making sure you’re going to have competent colleagues.
Add to that the fact that among programmers, there’s a large chunk who aren’t very good at programming to begin with.
Now have the not-very-good programmers interview people for the job they’re not good at themselves with little interview training and little motivation.
So of course there are lots of stories out there about bizarre and ineffective job interviews.
Some of the best programmers I ever hired were marginally autistic (imo) and disastrous in interviews with the H.R. lady and all those weird aggressive questions. (Where do they get these women?) H.R. said not to hire but, fortunately, Development made the ultimate decision.
Interviewing is hard and (afaik) most companies do very little to train their employees to be decent interviewers.
Add to that the fact that many people see interviewing as a distraction from their regular work rather than as an important investment in making sure you’re going to have competent colleagues.
Add to that the fact that among programmers, there’s a large chunk who aren’t very good at programming to begin with.
Now have the not-very-good programmers interview people for the job they’re not good at themselves with little interview training and little motivation.
So of course there are lots of stories out there about bizarre and ineffective job interviews.
Some of the best programmers I ever hired were marginally autistic (imo) and disastrous in interviews with the H.R. lady and all those weird aggressive questions. (Where do they get these women?) H.R. said not to hire but, fortunately, Development made the ultimate decision.