Ola, Andrew. I think your assumption that weird HR policies imply the company is bad is unfortunately incorrect. I say "unfortunately" because I wish it were tr

Ola, Andrew. I think your assumption that weird HR policies imply the company is bad is unfortunately incorrect. I say "unfortunately" because I wish it were true, since I wish could follow your advice and simply avoid companies with doubtful HR practices from the start. I recently contacted 3 friends/acquaintances that work in 3 companies I'd like to apply at. These are engineer-driven companies that are thriving and have a good reputation as good places to work at. I still had to go thru HR in all of them. In one case (a certain search/advertising company) the in-house recruiter cut my process short after a phone interview without asking me a single technical question. So I couldn't talk to the hiring manager (it's the job of the recruiter to filter down the number of people the hiring manager has to talk to) or even a technical peer for that matter. Essentially they're randomly throwing a large % of the resumes in the trashcan, but they can get away with it because they receive a very large number of resumes to start with.