And unfortunately, from the point of view of the company, this is a feature not a bug:
* to the company the cost of a false positive (bad hire) is very very much higher than the cost of a false negative (passing on a good candidate).
* AI companies have a large pool of strong candidates to interview
* Therefore they are incentivized to make their interview process hard enough that a poor candidate almost never passes it
* but then it becomes something a strong candidate can only pass with a bit of good luck
This is not “fair”, but it’s a marketplace. The best approach is the one you propose: accept it and don’t take it personally if you miss, roll the dice again.
Why is it that most other jobs especially low skill take the opposite approach? You screw up or demonstrate your incompetence on your first day on a construction job site you are let go right then.
I think it's trickier to gauge in knowledge work because there's a ramp-up period, even for top performers. Just understanding the institutional context that led to the current ecosystem - essentially understanding every Chesterton's Fence you encounter - takes a substantial amount of time.
Typically there's a lot of onboarding, and even a good candidate might not get a lot done in the first month or three... By the time you realize the new hire isn't a good fit, you've spent a ton of time on training.
Otoh, if you hire me to frame a house, it'll be objectively clear you need to get rid of me in the first hour, if not the first ten minutes. I don't know how I'd get past a screening for that either, but still.
They don’t have the money to hire lawyers to pursue discrimination suits, and the potential SME employers frequently don’t have the balance sheet to be collectible.
It’s a different ballgame when you can gamble $20k to make $1M.
They just have a pool that’s filled with bad candidates. They want to disable luck for them.
Ironically, they turn on luck even more.
No it isn't, their strategy is great at increasing the rate at which they select those deadly "bad hires". There's just an insane amount of risk in doing these sorts of tech interview things; code up a quick monte carlo simulation to convince yourself if you like. It's just that the risk doesn't fall on the improperly aligned humans conducting the interview, it's offloaded onto the company.
Exactly, you could just as easily hire a bad candidate because they got lucky, and this happens all the time.
I mean, they could just as easily hire a bad candidate that happened to cram that specific interview knowledge the day before but is otherwise a bad developer.
Personally I don’t agree with the crazy tech interviews at all, no other job on the planet does it like this, even high skill jobs like doctors or professors. They hire based on your experience, your references, and a good chat to make sure you’d be a culture fit. If there’s a serious problem with a doctor once they start the job, they’d be let go, but they’re professionals so this isn’t a super common occurrence.
The exact same process could be taken with developers IMO. If I have a seasoned career, you should hire me based on that, not because I jumped through hoops you set up.