I had a conversation with a fellow engineer and we pretty much concluded that our current company would not hire us with our current resumes if we had to go through the interviewing process. And we are generally viewed as some of the higher performers. I bet the same is true for a lot of other companies.
I too would most likely not get hired at my current company with the current interviewing process (which I am asked to do technical portions of!). Company growth really changes things.
I suck at writing resumes, to the point that recruiters and even hiring managers at companies that I applied to give me a pity and even talk on how to improve my resume DURING INITIAL PHONE CALL lmao.
(Your comment was probably downvoted because it broke this site guideline: Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put asterisks around it and it will get italicized.)
I have a similar perspective in that I think most engineers probably could get hired, but there's enough randomness in the interview process that we probably wouldn't. Not just in who gets advanced to the phone screen, but also variability in test performance. Most of the interviews were open-ended and had multiple correct answers - but it still really only answers, "did the candidate think of the right answer in X minutes". One of our questions pretty much explicitly required knowledge of how to implement a rolling hash to pass, and that's not something I knew when I worked at the company.
I'm of the mind that most interview questions can only reliably identify people who are not capable of coding, and roughly gauge the algorithms knowledge. I had floated the idea of making interview experiences that more closely resemble work, like having the candidates make PRs in a mock repository. Better yet we could see not just how they make a PR but also review PRs and make comments. But often the primary concern is logistical. It's easy to train people up on 1-hour problems with a grading rubric, than a longer more open ended interview.
For sure -- I've seen this at multiple companies. I'm not sure what causes this. I suspect there's a certain element of "pulling up the drawbridge" going on here.
