A thing I have noticed after fifteen years of interviewing people: almost every interview process is measuring how comfortable someone is being evaluated, and then reporting that as a measure of how good they are at the job. The tell is that the same candidate performs completely differently depending on the room. Give someone a whiteboard and three strangers and you learn how they handle being watched. Give them a real problem and an afternoon and you learn something about how they think. These correlate weakly, and we have built an entire industry on assuming they correlate strongly. What makes it hard to fix is that the noisy signal is cheap and the good signal is expensive. An hour of whiteboarding costs an hour. A realistic work sample costs a day of the candidate's time and half a day of yours, and multiplied across a funnel that is a real budget line that somebody has to defend. So we keep the cheap test and then add stages to compensate for its noise, which is how a process ends up with six rounds that are each individually indefensible. I do not have a clean answer. I have stopped pretending the current thing measures what we say it measures.
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Fifteen years of interviewing is fifteen years of a small sample with no counterfactual. You never find out how the people you rejected would have done, which means the confident claim that the signal is noise is not something the experience could establish either way. I agree the process is unpleasant. The step from unpleasant to uninformative needs evidence that this kind of accumulated impression cannot provide.
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something you reckon. a gripe, a hunch, a hill you will die on. serious or not.
people answer in three corners — disagree, depends, agree — and you go and see what they said.
small on purpose. you will need a code from someone already here.
what all this does to your head, and what to do about it.