I have been heavily involved in the tech interview/hiring process for a few unicorns, doing a couple hundred interviews in that time, and my experience was: 1.

I have been heavily involved in the tech interview/hiring process for a few unicorns, doing a couple hundred interviews in that time, and my experience was: 1. A lot of people have no idea how to evaluate a candidate, even with a rubrik. I have been in many evaluations where I tracked with particular interviewers said about a pros or cons of a candidate and it is near noise when you get beyond candidates that are clearly not qualified. Even simple questions like "dedup a list of integers". Sometimes the interviewer really focuses on if they maintained order of the dedup list, other times it doesn't matter, other times they care about time complexity, sometimes not. This is especially bad when an interviewer is allowed to choose the question that they ask, because they choose questions that have something they find "cute" and if the candidate doesn't pick up on that "cuteness" it's really hard to evaluate them. 2. A lot of people I have met think that an interview process should be able to evaluate some random developer you pluck off the street without prep. The larger companies are less inclined to believe this but smaller ones I have found either don't know or don't have the person-power to prep interviewees. Again, a lot of people think whatever knowledge they like is the knowledge everyone should have. 3. A lot of people I have met think that you can understand after 5-7 hours worth of interviewing, where one person probably only interacts with the candidate for an hour or so under stressful conditions, it that translate to someone you can be around for 40 hours. It just doesn't. 4. A lot of companies look at interviewing as finding the missing puzzle piece of the company rather than shaping the puzzle piece. They just want candidates to join and go. That's really tough to do at even a moderate scale. I think a lot of companies don't really realize how both difficult and high leverage hiring is. You're spending a few hours with someone to determine how they will work over thousands of hours. They want hiring to be easy, you just see if the person passes the checkmarks and they are in! And if you don't confront the reality you can't adequately solve the problem.