Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Classic bigotry. Hiring is all about finding the best candidate. If you find you cannot function sitting in conference room with three other people for an hour, there is a 100% chance there is a better candidate suited for the role, even if his/her technical skills are less than yours. Jobs have soft skill requirements, and there is nothing bigoted about that.
I'm curious about this. When I've hired, I've always wondered how I can actually tell (a) what soft skills are required for the role and (b) whether a candidate has them. People sometimes think that's a silly thing to ponder: it's obviously obvious! But at most places I've worked, we spend lots of time defining the technical skills required for a job and handwave the rest. I guess people assume "they'll know it when…
Being able to communicate clearly and interact with coworkers is the most basic soft skill required for most jobs.
Communicating clearly with coworkers is foundational to interviews because you have to communicate as part of the interview. Don't overthink it into something more complicated.
> being comfortable sitting in a conference room for an hour is an important part of their job. In some workplaces that would be an odd requirement.
I think you're taking it too literally. Being able to converse with coworkers in a conference room is an interview proxy for being able to communicate with coworkers on the job. You're not literally testing their ability to sit in a conference room, you just happen to be in a conference room because that's where the interview takes place.
The internet is always full of arguments that some people might be really bad at interviewing but great at the job. That's true to some degree, but in my experience a lot of the difficult behaviors that show up in the interview (poor communication, uncomfortable talking to coworkers, or even if someone is difficult to work with) don't disappear after those candidates are hired. People are usually trying their hardest during the interview to look good, so often those characteristics become worse, not better, once they're hired.
It's tough to discuss online because nobody likes to think about rejecting people for soft skills. We want to maintain this Platonic ideal of a programmer who creates brilliant code in a vacuum and nothing else matters, but in real jobs clear communication is really important.