This was written by a guy whose username I found somewhere was "Rizzex". But it was funny and utterly true:
Software interviews are a plague on humanity: They suck.
Here is how they work: One group of monkeys who have formed a tribe are introduced to a strange outside monkey. This monkey looks and smells funny, he has not yet been rubbed with feces and rolled in the common mud hole so they cannot determine if this is a good monkey or a bad monkey. Will this monkey make loud noises and summon nearby jaguars while they are all foraging for food and get them all killed? No one knows for sure. Clearly this monkey must be tested.
The alpha monkey from the tribe…who knows everything, has a brilliant idea: Let me find a bunch of questions which I personally love in domain areas that give me a hard-on and then ask this outsider monkey these questions and watch him squirm while I crack my knuckles and chortle about how smart I am.
Having greatly enjoyed Databases and Scalability , the alpha monkey proceeds to belittle the new monkey with these questions. Of course, the outsider monkey fails miserably and is clearly not a fit. The alpha monkey knows best: If this monkey does not enjoy Databases and Scalability they can’t be good because he personally loves these things and has studied them in depth. Therefore: No hire.
Except for one thing. The new monkey was interviewing for an iOS programming role. Befuddled, the outsider monkey leaves the territory of the new tribe wondering to himself: “What kind of shitty interview was that? I applied for a job building iPhone apps and didn’t get asked a single XCode question. The guy kept asking me about how to scale AWS services. I didn’t even put any of those things on my resume?”
The new monkey has made a critical mistake: Thinking that what he writes on his resume actually gets read by anyone. No, the way interviews actually work is that other monkeys pick topics they enjoy personally and then pelt the incoming monkey with random questions from those domains without respect for the job title or the background of the new monkey.
Why is this the case? Because humans are nothing but large monkeys who hate outsiders and wish to ensure that only other monkeys just like them get in the door.
