That would be wonderful is interviews were actually done with the idea of finding out if a prospective employee was proactive or not, but most interviews are just the interviewers going off a checklist of questions they think they need to ask because they are effectively in a cargo cult.
Take the questions on scalability for instance. I personally don't have any experience with scaling on requests, my highest demand was an application with <5000 users for the entire client base. I want the experience so in my last job hunt I apply to a number of jobs that I know get a lot of traffic. I tell the recruiter the chance to get experience in that skill set is why I am applying. The recruiter tells me the desire to learn is all they want. I get to the interviews and have the same talk with the engineers and the same response. They then ask me system design questions and I answer as best as I can along with bringing up approaches I've heard of but don't have experience with. Interview ends and the recruiter tells me they are passing because I don't have the experience in scaling they want. I had this happen with multiple companies.
Not wanting an employee without that experience is perfectly fine, but why waste everyone's time when an interviewee tells you from the get go that they don't have one of your must haves? When resumes are passed over for implicit signals like which school you're from, unusual names, spelling errors, etc, why go through all of it? It's because most companies and most people interviewing have no idea what they want or what they are doing and are just copying approaches they've seen before.
It's the same problem that gets you interviews where they want you to reverse red black trees on a whiteboard but the actual job is just implementing CRUD api's, or building jobs that run an algorithm that is basic algebra once a day.
At this point a "grill you on everything" interview for any position that's not director level or someone getting paid double the market, because they actually need you to know everything, is just a red flag that the company has no idea what's going on and you'll have better luck making the interviewers like you as a person than actually learning all those skills
"most interviews are just the interviewers going off a checklist of questions they think they need to ask because they are effectively in a cargo cult."
Recruiter here. I interviewed with a company ~9 months ago and they asked me "how do you choose whether to hire for experience or pedigree". I gave a bunch of reasons why you might trade off one for the other and the interviewer made a bit of a sour face. He then asked me "is there another way to phrase what you're saying?" I said "Well, the way you make those tradeoffs depends on..." and he cut me off and said "thats what i was looking for". When I asked what he meant, he said that the answer on the sheet was "It depends" and he wanted me to literally say those words.
I didn't continue the process as I can't imagine the type of culture that gets people to that point of disengagement.
Unfortunately its the kind of culture most companies seem to get. The few that don't have that culture, like early Facebook or google, can skyrocket from getting actual talent, but even those companies start to devolve into the scripts once they get large enough unless there is a concerted effort to avoid it.
People are animals and animals are lazy so the path of least effort gets chosen the majority of the time, and that means going off of predetermined scripts.
It does not help that many of those deciders can have conflicting incentives. The line manager may want to take anyone willing to learn and has the basics of programming, but the HR manager may have cutting costs as their overriding concern so why hire anyone whose not perfect since that's not 100% "optimal"
That’d be odd though. HR usually have no weight on the decision making. If HR does, I wouldn’t want to work there. I wouldn’t expect the legal team influences me hiring a junior developer. It is rhe manager’s responsibility to budget.
HR / legal might have a say when it comes to hiring like a C-level executive.
That may be the case in some places, but every company I've worked at has had HR have some say in hiring. The worst place was one where it didn't start out that way until the head of HR played some political move and refused to process the paperwork for any hires unless they had gone through their SilkRoad software and been vetted by HR first. We immediately went from getting some decent candidates in interviews to suddenly interviewing people who didn't know what loops were but had listed 10+ years of experience as a software engineer on their resume
A bit late but I forgot to add the worst case I've ever seen. We had hired a new dev who was going to take over a senior position when we had multiple openings for over 6 months. The offer had been signed and returned when the head of HR rescinded the offer. When pressed for a reason why, his exact quote was, "We aren't the Yankees, were like the Oakland A's. Were just looking to get on base, not to be number 1"
Take the questions on scalability for instance. I personally don't have any experience with scaling on requests, my highest demand was an application with <5000 users for the entire client base. I want the experience so in my last job hunt I apply to a number of jobs that I know get a lot of traffic. I tell the recruiter the chance to get experience in that skill set is why I am applying. The recruiter tells me the desire to learn is all they want. I get to the interviews and have the same talk with the engineers and the same response. They then ask me system design questions and I answer as best as I can along with bringing up approaches I've heard of but don't have experience with. Interview ends and the recruiter tells me they are passing because I don't have the experience in scaling they want. I had this happen with multiple companies.
Not wanting an employee without that experience is perfectly fine, but why waste everyone's time when an interviewee tells you from the get go that they don't have one of your must haves? When resumes are passed over for implicit signals like which school you're from, unusual names, spelling errors, etc, why go through all of it? It's because most companies and most people interviewing have no idea what they want or what they are doing and are just copying approaches they've seen before.
It's the same problem that gets you interviews where they want you to reverse red black trees on a whiteboard but the actual job is just implementing CRUD api's, or building jobs that run an algorithm that is basic algebra once a day.
At this point a "grill you on everything" interview for any position that's not director level or someone getting paid double the market, because they actually need you to know everything, is just a red flag that the company has no idea what's going on and you'll have better luck making the interviewers like you as a person than actually learning all those skills