The real reason you can't hire developers....

Even if you were, I would personally never want to work at a place which has this kind of a culture. I am out looking for a job where good business problems get solved in the most practical way. Which helps both the business and me make money.

Second kind of questions are asking the candidate arcane and rare facts that can be known only through rote memorization. Like asking him to work on some concept/data structure/algorithm from a CS text book taught in semester 3 on page 345 of a text book 2000 pages big.

There is nothing great about knowing an algorithm, inventing a new algorithm is special but not knowing one. Worse case anybody can know what you know by searching.

Asking irrelevant questions to the job, gives you a very high rate of false negatives. You are missing out on some very good and productive people.

This is exactly what happens, you ask some irrelevant questions and consider the guy useless. The same guy goes works at some php shop which is solving some business problems which get him and the company good money. And here you are searching and filtering candidate as per your requirements. Meanwhile you see, your start up failing and the average guy there winning. Suddenly you shout out 'Worse is better'.

You've got be brutally honest and practical in software engineering. If you are academics its a different game.

Remember your fantasy elitism in building a dream product and plans to hire rock stars to do it is nothing if it fails. The average guy still ends up winning even if he has 1/10 decent the product of your dreams, if he has a product to sell now.

This and some people just suck at the interview process. Ive been praised in the past for the quality of teams I've built. I think I'm good at hiring. That being said a few times when ive been an interviewer (not the hiring manager) I've tried to talk people out of hiring people who ended up being rockstars. I've also had other managers try to talk me out of hiring some folks I've been sold on who ended up being rockstars themselves.

Point being that hiring is a very inexact science. Sometimes when the bar is set high qualified people slip through the cracks. It's a hiring "cost". Sometimes you just do the best you can with an inexact science.

A bit over ten years ago I worked briefly at a company that didn't have internet access for the employees, so people had to write down things they needed to look up on paper and then look it up at home when they got back from work. The company, which had been around for decades and was an engineering shop, predictably went bankrupt because they were not able to adapt to modern conditions. You have to be able to keep up if you are going to work in the tech industry. This applies to companies even more so than employees.

Companies that can't handle working remotely in 2011 are exactly the same. They are dinosaurs and are becoming completely irrelevant. It's no wonder they can't even respond to emails, they are hopelessly confused and mired in the past.

This whole conversation will seem absurd in the post oil future where driving back and forth to work each day when it's completely unnecessary is seen as madness. Face to face interactions? What sort of argument is that anyway. We have had that for a while now through videophones. Almost everything that can be done in an office can be done in a home office. Even 3D prototype fabrication and hardware development is being done remotely.

When a company says they can't handle people working remotely the right response is stunned silence, and then the observation they sure as heck better get that fixed pronto. It's not like it's even difficult to do, it's dead simple and doesn't even cost anything extra. There is simply no excuse for such a level of backwardness in a tech company in this day and age. What's next? Eschewing electricity?

People from more than 3/4 of all the countries in the world took classes at Stanford this quarter and none of them even knew if the professor was wearing pants because everything was remote. Laptops have been around for decades. Video conferencing for several years, IM for decades, collaborative white boards and editing software. Bugtracking and version control are all on the web. What on earth is going on at these companies that they don't know about what is going on? Even hospitals are getting xrays evaluated overseas. Customer support calls from someone in Texas are routed to a customer service rep working out of his kitchen in Ireland. Idle fast food employees at the 10am slump in Idaho are taking orders for the lunch crowd rush at 12 noon for a sister restaurant in Atlanta.

Here's a prediction that is so right I'm calling it a fact. Any tech company at the cusp of 2012 that doesn't have remote employees is on life support. If they can't fix that, I absolutely guarantee you that company is not going to be around 3 years from now. They just aren't. Any skeptics about this, let's check back right here in this comment in 2015 and see who got it right. Will there be any tech companies with no remote employees (other than sole proprietorships with no employees) in 2015? I say no.