I will not do a tech interview

I think this is an important consideration. I do interviews quite often at my current company. And two steps of the interview process is a technical phone interview and a technical on-site interview.

I always ask coding questions, but before I start, I clearly tell the guys that they can use any language they want, and that I do not expect the program to "compile" or parse (in case of interpreted languages). What I always try to read is 1) that the person is not completely lost about programming, 2) What is his approach to solving the problem, and that he can explain it to me.

The problem I have with technical interviews (I also have always hated them when I've been in the interviewee sit), is when interviewers setup an "all or nothing" style. Usually it is because they were told to interview you, but they really don't know to do an interview, so they just read a bunch of problems to you and wait for you to solve them... without trying to read anything from the process.

But the interview process is such a time suck (not to mention that you have to nick out on your regular job which you can only do so many times for a half a day before they get wise) that by the time you are walking into an office for an interview, you've already made a non-trivial commitment. You can only repeat it a handful of times (assuming you have another job or are otherwise professionally engaged) before it becomes a real burden.

Now, if you are unemployed and you have a substantial financial cushion or can pick up enough 'anytime/anyplace' freelance work, sure, interview with 5 companies a week, take your time and be picky. But how many job seekers are in such an ideal position?

Any part way competent interviewer knows the difference between a bad interview and nerves getting the better someone. When it's nerves we're not thinking "they're awful", we're thinking "i don't know how good they are".

At that point I'm generally too busy to try and come up with a bunch of other things myself on the off chance the person will respond better to a different situation BUT if the person were proactive and came back and said "I know I screwed that up, would it be possible to try X instead", I think I'd be open to that.

(That said obviously giving small paid projects work to all potential interviewees doesn't scale particularly well.)

> cost of time they're not producing but drawing a salary

How many false positives do you know of who didn't produce anything? What is the actual chance that someone is going to be a net drag if they don't work out? Of course it can happen, but I get the impression from the more paranoid that it is likely or expected. I don't see that.

> eating dev time for training, etc.

This, I feel, is highly dependent on company and codebase. At my previous employer, I worked on real-time radar signal processing code which was very complicated and math-heavy. Someone who did not know what they were doing in that code could have easily cratered the productivity of one or more software or systems engineers. Simpler codebases would not be as bad.

> + cost of firing

Depending on your local laws and corporate structure, I can understand this issue. It takes an act of Congress to get fired from a defense contractor, though they have enough small layoffs to prune the dead wood once in awhile without a full-blown firing. I would like to know what the issues are for a smaller company though, since I really don't know the process. I get mixed signals as well. It seems like the employers and managers here speak of the difficulty in actually getting rid of people, while most of the individual contributors I know are worried about losing their jobs at the drop of a hat.

> Maybe this is from the perspective of a company that has no shortage of applications, but rejecting an applicant that would've been good costs basically nothing (dev time + travel if they got through phone screens).

If your company is finding the people it needs more or less when it needs them, then I understand this view. However, if your company is also one of those that complains about how hard it is to find "qualified" people and how understaffed you are, then your false positives are costing your business far more than that, though the true cost is very difficult to quantify (as is the true cost of a false positive).