Founder of http://InterviewKickstart.com http://InterviewKickstart.com here. This is a great observation and I fully agree with the author. I joined Box.com as

Founder of http://InterviewKickstart.com http://InterviewKickstart.com here. This is a great observation and I fully agree with the author. I joined Box.com as an Engineer in 2008, when we were 5 engineers. Grew rapidly with the company and was most recently a Director in Engineering, managing multiple teams full of amazing people. Left after 6 years, to fulfill my entrepreneurial dreams. Box was my career-launching company. (And it is, for many other engineers). I have also worked at Microsoft and eBay. Along the way, I had the incredible opportunity to help our technical teams grow from 5 to ~250 engineers. This meant living and breathing the interviewing machine exploring all its nooks and corners, and ups and downs. Box is also a company that constantly questions and improves its interviewing processes. That relentless focus helped us hire great engineers. I noticed however, that despite all that attention, hiring took an unreasonably long amount of time and much agony. We’d go through hundreds of resumes, countless phone screens and countless onsite interviews for each open position. That bothered me to no end. If most of our interviews were of reasonably average difficulty, our scoring method was well-structured, and our interviewers well-trained, why would only a few candidates clear our interviews? Yet, in the end, our pass rate was <5%. I was not ready to believe that rest 95% of people were not competent. I dug into this extensively, and realized that while everyone was hard-working and very smart in their own way, they vastly under-estimated the amount of preparation it would take to clear programming interviews at top companies. They only had a vague idea of what to expect, and did not have enough practice to solve interview problems under time-pressure. Their daily jobs or schools did not prepare them for handling interviews. I found more evidence of this from the career-coaching I did on the side (pro-bono). Many candidates would even want to change their careers, thinking they were not good at programming, simply because they weren't able to crack interviews. I'm now doing something similar in the valley, but in a very high-touch, classroom setting way, for experienced professionals: http://InterviewKickstart.com http://InterviewKickstart.com. We've been lucky to have had excellent success and very satisfying career transforming stories.