After 35 years of technical interviews at major tech companies, a seasoned evaluator declares the traditional hiring process is fundamentally broken. The author, who worked as a Bar Raiser at Amazon and on Google's Hiring Committee, describes interview outcomes as statistically terrible with little correlation to actual job performance. Unconscious biases and inconsistent evaluations plague a system that has changed little in decades.

Companies have attempted band-aid solutions like Amazon's Bar Raisers and Microsoft's As-Appropriate roles, essentially admitting standard interviewers can't be trusted. Google's own analysis revealed interviewers often gave wildly different scores for the same candidate. In one revealing exercise, a hiring committee reviewed their own interview packets and voted not to hire most of themselves, exposing the process's deep flaws.

Challenging the interview process remains taboo in tech, with engineers defending a gauntlet they themselves passed. The author argues the current approach borders on pseudoscience, failing to reliably determine if someone can do a job. Despite knowing the system is broken, companies resist overhaul due to inertia, leaving HR to manage the fallout while the technical assessment industry continues unchanged.