A friend of mine recently got this agenda for an onsite interview:
This is after...
- a 30 min call with the recruiter
- a 45 min coding interview with a lead dev
- a 45 min coding interview with a Backend Sr. SDET
- a 45 min technical with Frontend Sr. SDET
Pardon my french, but WTAF? 7 straight hours?! 10 total (plus prep & travel time)?! What an incredible waste - of the candidate's time, of the company's time. Oh, and they didn't offer him the job.
This level of indecision is a red flag! If a team can't make a decision after 3 - 4 conversations, the candidate should seriously question whether over-analysis permeates the organization.
This is egregious, but it isn't far outside the norm. Everyone knows software engineering interviews are broken. In an industry with some of the best minds our generation, we can't figure this out?
How Did We Get Here?
I discussing this with a friend who is an surgeon, he said he has never had to prove his technical skills in an interview. Why? Medical candidates have licensure, continuing education requirements, a case history, and (potentially) litigation history. The interviews are generally just for culture fit. Similarly, Computer Networking & System Admin has long relied on certifications as a signal of candidate technical skill.
In contrast, Software Engineering has largely ignored certifications, has no uniform system for gauging continuous learning, and the vast majority of candidates' professional work is closed source. Interviewers are flying blind, and candidates must prove themselves anew for each new company. So, we move cautiously, with gauntlet interviews because bad hires are extremely expensive.
But, I think the problem goes deeper....
We're Not Wired For This
It is incredibly difficult not to take a job rejection personally 1, but it borders on ridiculous that job interviews are essentially gauging a person, in all their complexity, in a one hour interaction (or even multiple one hour interactions with a panel). From the perspective of both interviewer and candidate, there is precious little information on which to make a decision. It is taking hints & subtleties from conversation and using inference to make a decision. Pair that with people's biases, dissimilar interests & backgrounds, mood, time of day, flawed interview questions 2, etc., and it seems closer to dumb luck than science.
But, yes, there is science. We try to compensate for biases by structuring interviews carefully: take-home assignments, asking for STAR stories, & posing Leetcode problems and system design prompts, but overall interviews are still terrible predictors of job performance. (And, AI may have already beaten them).
I posit that perhaps it is not the interview technique that is flawed, but the very idea of interviews - especially of strangers. We evolved in small tribal groups in which each person had an informed social network & a long history with others in the group. We are terrible at quickly assessing the compatibility of a person with whom we have no mutual connections.
But if you think about it, we already inherently know this, don't we? Internal candidates & employee referrals are far more likely to receive an offer. In analyzing Ashby's Talent Trend's Report, Gemini gave the following probabilities for candidates:
| Metric | Inbound (Cold) | Employee Referral | Internal Candidate |
| App-to-Interview | ~3% | ~40% | ~42% |
| Interview-to-Offer | ~27% | ~16% | ~32% |
| App-to-Offer (Total) | ~0.81% | ~6.4% | ~13.44% |
| Hiring Probability | 1 in 123 | 1 in 16 | 1 in 7.4 |
Anecdotally, I think candidate priority shakes out something like this:
- Internal candidates who have worked directly with hiring manager
- Internal candidates who have worked with hiring team
- Other internal candidates / Referrals from hiring manager
- Referrals from within hiring team
- Other employee referrals
- Friend-of-a-friend referrals
- Non-referral external candidates found by internal recruiter
- Cold applicants
We know this, but positions are often opened to multiple (or likely all) levels of that hierarchy with countless hours being spent on & by candidates with marginal chances.
It makes sense that we would hire those we know. Interviews are an attempt to predict job performance, and direct working experience with a candidate is a goldmine of information in an otherwise information-sparse process. On the other side of the table, candidates higher in the hierarchy also have an information asymmetry advantage in that they are more likely to be familiar with the problems the team is encountering, the scale at which they work, the personalities of the interviewers, etc.
Millions of years of evolution have wired us to make interpersonal judgements based on existing social connections. Why pretend that is not the way we hire?
Predicting Criticism
"WAIT!!" I hear you saying. What about racism, sexism, ageism, class discrimination, etc.? Yes, valid point. Those are biases we must try to eliminate. You could even level the criticism that I am advocating for nepotism.
I am not dismissing any of those concerns. The core idea here is that idea of conducting fair interviews across a group of people ranging from friends to complete strangers is flawed. Perhaps instead of conducting interviews which give the facade of treating everyone as strangers, we make more friends. That is, we look for ways to connect & work together that are lower stakes, which account for some of our biases, and when the time comes to hire, we are honest about the pool we are actually drawing from.
For many people a job provides their sole income, insurance, and significant social connection. Modern job offers are a bit like a marriage proposal after a handful of dates.3 If you hear a story start that way, it's a fairly safe bet it didn't end well. Sure, we could plan those few dates in a way that allows us to better analyze the potential suitors, but that would be as ridiculous as it sounds. That is why we lean on our social circles.
Some readers may also say something along the lines of "You shouldn't criticize, unless you have a better idea." This variant of Tu quoque is so common, I'm surprised it doesn't have it's own name (as far as I can tell) - I propose "mandatory solution fallacy".
Solve the problem that has tripped up an entire industry for decades in a single blog post? 😆. Probably not. I have some ideas, but don't expect a brilliant part 2. My hope is that we as an industry can start having these honest conversations and find a better way.
A Note To The Job Seekers
I am writing from a place perhaps I should not...frustration. I am sitting down after a long walk outdoors. It should have been relaxing, but I was processing - processing another interview pipeline that has fallen through. I'm in my 6th month of unemployment, despite job hunting 40 - 60 hours a week, starting literally the day I was laid off - because the company needed to make cuts and remote workers were top of the list.
In the last 5 months:
- I’ve lost count of the number of companies that have ghosted me, even up to the CEO interview, after telling me to expect further interviews.
- Even direct employee referrals are often not even yielding a callback at this point.
- In January 2026, I had a total of 3 interviews all month. (Turns out it was the worst month for layoffs in 15 years. source)
- I’ve had recruiters cold contact me, then ghost me without meeting.
- I've had warm intros to people who LinkedIn stalked me, then didn't bother replying to the intro.
Between larger economic forces & AI, the market is unlike anything I have ever seen. It isn't you!!
Head up; we'll get through this. Our security comes not from money, but from connection.
A thought...
The way I see the market going is toward contract work (I'm not alone). At this point, W2 jobs are not much more stable than contract roles, and their loss is more impactful with most people losing both sole income & insurance together (not to mention social connections). Layoffs are now so common that they are not even a PR issue for companies.
Contract roles are often easier to get because the risk to the company is lower. Perhaps they are lower risk to the contractor as well, if that person maintains multiple revenue streams.
For candidates, I think pursuing contract work might be where the market is pushing us. Anecdotally, the friends that have pursued contract work have had much more success. That's where I'm shifting my efforts.
And, on a positive note, if this person is right, things are looking up.
1 For the job seekers, a rejection likely has relatively little to do with you as a person, and more to do with the stars aligning with a particular group of people. When you are looking for a job, you want meaningful work (perhaps in a specific industry), interesting work, specific technologies, growth (meaning working on something you don't know well), great company culture, good pay & benefits, etc. It is incredibly hard to tick all of those boxes. Companies have their own set of boxes, so don't be surprised if you get turned down for not ticking all of them.
2 Many interview questions boil down to "does this person know what I know?". The most obvious of these are technical trivia questions, but perhaps more problematic are those that ask the candidate to address technical or people problems that the team is facing internally. External candidates are at a massive disadvantage.
3 Except they aren't marriage proposals are they? Loyalty is dead. Neither companies nor employees expect things to last long, especially in tech, so it is "who can make a buck and move on before the other side calls it quits?" The employee just has far more to lose if it ends unexpectedly. Long interview pipelines don't fit with the current state of things.