HOW the heck CAN you evaluate potential or learning speed in a 30min interview?! I've been a couple times on the interviewing side of an interview (being an eng

HOW the heck CAN you evaluate potential or learning speed in a 30min interview?! I've been a couple times on the interviewing side of an interview (being an engineer), and trust me, evaluating a senior is 1000% easier than evaluation a junior: resume makes sense, the fact that he has experience that may overlap yours makes it easy to come up with relevant and revealing questions during and interview etc. Evaluating a junior is SCAAARY! You have no idea what to ask him so that you can get relevant answers! ...so most people "give up" and throw an algoritmic puzzle or something like that hoping that "raw IQ + ability to manifest it during the stress of the interview" means "she has a reasonable chance of being useful for the company". As a startup the risk of wasting time onboarding a junior that turns up not to be useful it might simply not be worth it. Also, this is the reason why companies like banks still look at education when hiring juniors, more like "heck, maybe the top-tier universities did some filtering themselves so it would make our job a little bit easier".