Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

This is one of my pet peeves. The number of applications you get has absolutely nothing to do with the number of candidates you should consider, because it has absolutely nothing to do with the number of candidates that you can competently consider. You don't have to get through every resume, and trying to do so will just lead to biased "how can I say no" ad hoc filtering games.

The solution is to use an unbiased* pre-filter to restrict the number of applicants that you let into a thorough consideration process. Random selection is the pre filter that I would use, but there may be other valid choices (though outside of random selection, it's easy to let bias slip in).

Bonus points if you are transparent with candidates that get filtered out this way about why and how that happened. If you're messaging is constructed well, then they should understand that there were too many candidates to give all of them fair consideration, and that being filtered out reflects in no way on their worth as a candidate. So, they will be more likely to apply for future openings.

Sorry if it feels like I'm criticizing you. I don't mean to at all. It's just that this idea of being overwhelmed by candidates is absolutely pervasive in discussions of hiring, and it's a completely fake problem that leads to absolutely real difficulty on both sides of the hiring process.

* A lot of organizations resort to biased pre-filters to cull resumes, like unnecessary requirements. I'm of the opinion that this leads to suboptimal results, particularly if they align significantly with the biased filters that the rest of the industry your company is competing in uses. It means that there are qualified candidates that end up systematically under-recruited. Those are the Moneyball candidates. You should want those candidates because they are the most productive relative to the salaries they can demand. And even if you don't give them a lower salary than you would give a candidate that passes all the typical filters, then you will still have a significant retention advantage, which all told may be worth more than shaving salary in many (most?) situations.

Front-ends almost always involve working with data. It is increasingly common for front-ends to have filters, searching, sorting, etc... of that data as well.

Doing that efficiently is key to ensuring a fast, responsive UI.

Wrangling with divs and CSS may take a disproportionately large amount of your time but that doesn't mean it's the most important skill to look for, nor does it mean the CS questions are somehow irrelevant to the work.

I later discovered his resume was an identical copy of his coworker's resume (both were submitted several months apart for the same job).

I'm totally serious: I really wonder how many of these baffling interview experiences where seemingly highly-qualified candidates get turned down is really about non-technical and non-work-related factors, but no one wants to actually admit it. How much of it is due to personal biases by the interviewers, who may discriminate against people for various reasons? A lot of people want to surround themselves with people just like themselves, so if you have a company full of hipsters wearing fedoras and someone comes in for an interview and they don't look like that, they could easily be passed over because they're "not a fit for our company culture".

I don't think I'm half as competent as the guy who wrote this article, but I've had a much easier time getting jobs in general. My background isn't even CS, it's EE, so I totally suck at all the algorithm questions. But OTOH I generally apply for embedded programming positions where knowledge of algorithms isn't that important anyway. I even interviewed at Google (one of their recruiters contacted me) and had pretty much the same experience as him; I won't waste my time with that company again. A bunch of recruiters have tried to get me to interview at Bloomberg LP, but I would never work in that crappy open-plan environment that they're infamous for. But I frequently wonder how much of my success is just from being tall and in-shape, not having any obvious personality quirks, and "fitting in" with the look and the company culture (I interview with more stodgy places, not places with hipsters with arm-sleeve tattoos), rather than due to my technical proficiency.