H.R. Interviewer: "Now Mike, may I call you Mike? Pope Julius II is looking for someone to paint the ceiling of the new Sistine chapel. Frankly, I passed on you initially because you didn't have any ceiling painting experience but I've been told to talk to you anyway.

To start, I'd like to ask you to take a test with some Egyptian art history questions..."

I've had a interview like this. It was for a web dev position at a local business, but the interviewer had used a copy/paste algorithms question from Leetcode that reeked of CTCI influence and "Google used it, so it must be good at filtering candidates".

Or in the software world...I see you have essentially built my exact company before and have tons of experience, but what I really need to know before I hire you is...Can you show me how many queens you can put on a chess board in code!

let numQueens = 64;

queen_count = lambda(board_width): board_width - (board_width in [2,3])

I suspect HR does gating because it works. HR’s goal is to fill the interview pipeline with as many “reasonable” candidates as possible. They can’t spend much time looking at each candidate since there’s so many. But if it sends down an obviously bad candidate, they’ll get yelled at. HR Gating is applying some naive statistical thinking. 80% of our employees have trait X. Therefore by filtering for trait X we increase the odds of sending reasonable candidates down the pipe. Filter by enough traits, and you’ll be sending only “reasonable” candidates through to the next stage. Cheap and rarely obviously wrong.

The problem, of course, is that trait X could be anything. Technology, trivia, personality, Microsoft Excel Whiz, X years of experience, Causation, correlation, it doesn’t matter. “Reasonable” does not mean “fair” or “logical” or “causative.” It’s just a statistical trick.

I suspect that the “CS Trivia Interview” is just a more nuanced version of this. Knowing now to invert a binary tree doesn’t make you a better programmer (no causation). But many good programmers happen to know how to do it (or want the job enough to learn it just to please you). So it’s an easier metric than trying to define what “good engineer” means.

I may be lucky, or I may be ignorant, but thus far not having a degree at all hasn't particularly impaired me.

I think it's interesting that there's nothing equivalent to a professional engineering qualification for software. Worst case, hiring people for a few months to do some software development and being able to say "They developed some software" would be a useful thing to look up rather than conducting the spanish whiteboard inquisition every time.

I think it's interesting that few/none of the "Technical hiring done right" startups I'm aware of deduplicate the process of attesting that a person can accomplish some software development. So far as I can tell, they outsource the process of screening, but they don't provide the same screening to multiple companies.

This is really not an exaggeration. When I was looking for android jobs a few jobs had requirements that only aosp google or amazon kindle people would really have.