This shows how broken interviews are. I mean the biggest example is the What’s app founder who was rejected from Facebook and then sold his company to Facebook for a lot of billions.
For as long as I can remember Atlassian did everything they could to justify bringing cheaper people on working visas: thus 5-6 interviews, long pauses between each stage, lower-than-market salaries, public complaining by CEO for not having enough local resources for hiring - basically anything to make a local (Australian) programmer not to get a job.
In Ian's case, maybe they found people with better HTML5 qualifications, or more likely they found people with the other x relevant skills needed for the programme.
I agree, this is definitely one of those times where we only have one side of the story. I think they are humorous but likely not a real commentary on hiring practices.
Right, it's easy to make fun of the interviewers, but it seems incredibly unlikely to me that they would miss something like that on a resume (or that the interviewee would fail to bring it up). It's more likely that they just wanted someone who met some very specific requirements, and the people who were rejected simply failed to meet those requirements, even though they were possibly overqualified in other aspects.
Sebastian McKenzie @sebmck Facebook Got rejected from a junior position at Atlassian for not knowing enough about JavaScript. Shortly after they now use the JavaScript compiler that I wrote across most of their JavaScript stack.
Or
Ian Devlin @iandevlin Trivago Rejected by the Google HTML5 Developer Expert programme for not knowing enough about HTML5. Apparently being one of the HTML5 Doctors, writing many articles on the subject and having a book on HTML5 Multimedia being published wasn't enough for them.