It's stunning how much energy, ink and tongue movement is wasted trying to justify most decisions, in every aspect of life, when in practice they boil down to vibes.
I’m a hiring manager and I think it’s a complete roll of the dice sometimes.
There’s people who came off really well in the interview who turned out to be terrible hires. And equally there’s been people who seemed woefully inexperienced but I liked their honesty so took a gamble on them and they turned out to be some of my best hires.
Then there is everyone in between.
You have all of these processes in place to help your practical judgement but at the end of the day it’s really just a lot of luck because it’s trivially easy to game interviews and some really good engineers are often really bad at interviewing. So pulling those who interview well but are rubbish from those who don’t interview well but are brilliant is very difficult at times.
Heck in one interview I got nervous and started rambling on about FreeBSD instead of Linux. I was easily qualified enough for that job but that was a terrible interview on my part and I honestly wouldn’t have hired me.
So that's the issue - you're hiring someone and you have no idea which version of them showed up to the meeting, and which one will be coming to work every day.
It's almost like we're trying to solve a taylor series of work efficacy (of an individual on a given team) by capturing a very small number of data points in stressful situations (interviews) and doing a hell of a lot of extrapolation.
