>>Do you also believe that you can reliably assess it in a face to face interview with a candidate? Nope, I don't. I absolutely believe there is a significant

>>Do you also believe that you can reliably assess it in a face to face interview with a candidate? Nope, I don't. I absolutely believe there is a significant margin of error there but I also believe that, as human beings, we have to accept that we cannot be standardized plug-n-play hardware rather than try and come up with an algorithm that we rely on to tell us if a person is a good candidate or not. FWIW, I'm also against standardized testing in schools. You just end up people who are groomed specifically for those tests and in general the word "standardized" is kinda opposite of "diversity". >>How sure are you that you're not just assessing a candidate's ability to be confident and unflappable in a job interview? For dev jobs, at least you have background checks on past employment and/or education, a few coding tests and discussions around them to at least know this person isn't a totally 100% Grade-A Fraud. But indeed it is possible to end up with someone who just guessed right & prepared before hand for your questions then totally falls on their face the first month on the job. >>Have you ever had the experience of hiring someone who did amazingly well in their interview and turned out to be a total zero on your dev team? I'm very wary of subjective signals I get from interviews. I've seen this happen in at&t, more than once, where standardized'ish interviews were easy to guess and some people just knew exactly what to say and nobody applied any fraud-detection. But I admit I've also seen this happen in heavy culture-fit oriented interviews that still manage to leave something out. e.g., maybe the candidate actually gets frustrated easily and becomes very difficult to work with. If they did well in the interview then you never got to see what happens when they don't do well. Personally, I think this is just the chance we have to take as a society. If we really try hard to apply algos to humans I think we'll end up with a bunch of problems. I can see people grooming themselves specifically for those algos and I just don't think that's healthy for standardized interviews or standardized tests in schools. But indeed, this is all touchy-feeling-fuzzy-intangible-indefensible stuff. There's a movie called Gattaca: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119177/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119177/ That kinda talks about this and it turns out people get different impressions from this movie. Some people think what the main character did was unjustified fraud and some people think it's society that treated him unfairly because an algorithm said he was unfit for the role.