this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2025
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I have the opposite experience, when I was doing interviews I just skipped the very obviously underskilled people (which, IIRC were in the single digits) and interviewed pretty much everyone.
For context, I'm the main architect and dev of the company I was hiring for. Most of the candidates were horrible.
In 2006 I had a hard time finding C++ programmers in a university town. 9/10 who responded to the ads were just clueless. Of the remainder, we had a simple test - here's sample code in an IDE that draws a straight line on the screen (you'll be doing graphics programming in the role) - take that code and turn it into a program that draws a sine-wave in the same space... Everyone put computer graphic on their resume's, expressed confidence in their ability to perform in the role, deep former experience, but 5/6 who passed the clueless test couldn't manage that, given unlimited time and resources - the computer has internet access and a browser window open right there beside the IDE- USE IT!!!
Sadly, today we'd probably have to shut off the internet access aspect, or make the test much more difficult. Even AI can draw a sine wave.
A lot of this has to do with recruiters. I've been interviewing for a few years at my company such with as many different sets of recruiters, from recruiting firms to our corporate recruiters, to ones we hired ourselves. Our corporate recruiters handed over garbage candidates who we could often tell wouldn't work out after the first 10 min of the interview, whereas the other two groups of recruiters would do a good job filtering so we'd get than a 50% hit rate on our first round. Unfortunately, we promoted our recruiters once the need for talent dropped (or they moved on to a recruiter firm), and now they're unwilling to go back to recruiting.
The quality of your recruiter matters quite a bit, so you'll want to find someone who is experienced hiring a certain type of person so they know what to look for.
Absolutely, but in a big company you don't get to choose which recruiters you use - corporate just sends you candidates.
And those candidates are usually trash, especially in a company like mine where there are maybe a few dozen software roles and many hundreds of other roles. They just don't know how to recruit devs, they usually recruit marketing or domain specific people.
I was recruited as an R&D engineer by a company that was sales focused. It was pretty funny being recruited like a new sales hire: limo from the airport, etc. Limo driver didn't work direct for the company but she did a lot of work for them, it was an hour drive both ways to/from the "big" airport they used. She said most of the sales recruits she drove in were clueless kids, no idea how the world worked yet at all - gunning for a big commission job where 9/10 hires wash out within a year. At least after I arrived on-site I spent the day with my prospective new department, that was a pretty decent process. The one guy I didn't interview well with turned out to be the guy who had applied to the spot I was taking and had been passed over. As I was walking in on my first day he was just finishing moving his stuff out of the window-office desk he was giving up for me, into a cube. I can understand why he was a little prickly.