Your Tech Interview Process Is Trash—And You Know It
Let’s cut the polite BS.
Your interview process isn’t rigorous.
It’s not thorough.
It’s not “filtering for excellence.”
It’s broken. It’s performative. And it’s actively driving great talent away.
Six rounds.
A take-home assignment that takes ten hours—unpaid, of course.
A gauntlet of whiteboard leetcode roulette with smug engineers grilling candidates like it’s a middle school science fair.
Congratulations.
You’ve created a system that filters out everyone who doesn’t have the time, energy, or emotional bandwidth to perform for you like a circus animal.
You're Not Testing Talent—You're Testing Trauma Tolerance
Want to know who does well in your process?
- People who’ve memorized the game.
- People who’ve been through it so many times they’ve built psychological calluses.
- People with enough privilege to carve out two weeks for your process while still holding down their current job.
What about the best engineers you’ve never met?
They’re the ones who saw your job post, looked at your process, and said:
“Yeah, I’m not doing that.”
You Say You Want Builders. Then You Test for Academic Robots.
Your team needs problem-solvers. Collaborators. Engineers who know how to navigate messy codebases and messy humans.
But your process? It’s stuck in some Ivy League fantasy world where the only thing that matters is if they can reverse a linked list from memory under pressure.
Here’s the truth:
No one has ever been paged at 2 a.m. to invert a binary tree.
But they’ve been paged because your current “top hire” pushed garbage to prod and ghosted the fallout.
Take-Home Assignments Are a Lie
You frame them as “light” or “just a few hours.”
You say it’s “the fairest way to assess real skills.”
But let’s be honest—it’s free labor.
And you will ghost most of those candidates after they burn a weekend doing unpaid work you don’t even review.
Worse? You pretend this is normal.
It’s not. It’s exploitative. It’s lazy.
And you’re not running a process—you’re running a trauma gauntlet.
You Don’t Deserve Great Talent Until You Respect Their Time
A great candidate owes you nothing.
Not their evenings.
Not their weekends.
Not their emotional bandwidth.
You want to know if they’re good?
Talk to them.
Ask what they’ve built.
Look at their code.
Have a real, human conversation about how they solve problems in the world you actually operate in.
Better yet—pay them for a trial day. See how they think. How they collaborate. How they work in your chaos, not your fantasy scenario.
Stop worshipping the process. Start valuing the people.
Because every interview that breaks someone down isn’t proof of excellence—it’s proof of arrogance.
If your bar is so high only clones of your current team can pass it—your team isn’t elite.
It’s a cult.
Burn it down. Build something better.
Lead. Don’t Ctrl.
