But you did get to interviews. They still have to gather information about whether you’d be good or not — there are still some bozos graduating with EE/CS from

But you did get to interviews. They still have to gather information about whether you’d be good or not — there are still some bozos graduating with EE/CS from MIT, or even better schools such as Caltech. Pre-filtering based on how easy somebody is to evaluate has actual utility — it reduces hiring costs. If it’s useful, do it [0]. As for the author’s intentions, it’s clear some notion that you should be sympathetic to the candidate and thereby waste your time is encoded right into the title. Edit: [0] Just to head off an unnecessary argument, I don’t think it’s useful to have a hard-edge like that — it’s one piece of information that can be useful.