To be completely honest, it's actually an intriguing idea. I wonder, assuming some basic level of competency, if you gave a candidate some completely orthogonal task unrelated to the career and they excelled at it (assuming no cheating), would they be a better hire than another candidate?

Maybe! Quite often success at work is determined by getting crap done that doesn't require the skills you trained for initially.

> if you gave a candidate some completely orthogonal task unrelated to the career and they excelled at it... would they be a better hire

This idea has been tried. It’s called college.

True enough, and it works to a certain degree I think.

This would also imply that there's probably fruitful hiring ground in picking from anyone inside your organization (where you have the most direct knowledge) who does their job well, no matter what it is.

I'm given to understand companies used to do this.

Let’s take it to another level: the candidate realises that if they kill a current employee with the skills exactly matching theirs, would you hire them (assuming you can’t prove they killed the employee but it’s blatantly obvious) or would you think that’s unacceptable?

In Terry Pratchett's Assassins Guild they would hire them.

I remember a book by Jim Cramer in which he told a story about how he was offered a job "if you go in that office and fire that guy, right now". He did, and was.

Hiring people on the basis of arbitrary criteria opens you up to indirect discrimination claims. If some protected class X just so happens to perform below-average on that arbitrary criteria, then members of that group can claim indirect discrimination. If the criteria have some rational relationship to the actual job, that's a defence that may succeed. If the criteria are arbitrary and have no rational relationship to the actual job, then that defence isn't going to work. (The fact that there was no discriminatory intention behind the criteria, even if true, may be difficult to prove – arbitrary criteria that discriminate against people in practice, and which have no obvious justification, are likely to be presumed to have a discriminatory purpose, and how can you rebut that presumption?)

Interesting choice of words, but unfortunately there isn't really anything you can do about discrimination in a tech job interview in California, especially age discrimination and the authorities don't send secret shoppers into the tech interview process so it continues. I suspect you are over educated (which is not a bad problem to have, except it will cloud your judgment until you dumb down a bit).

skissane isn't stating that there's no discrimination, just that legally the practice of (algorithm-based) tech interviews is unlikely to be found discriminatory in a US court of law. Yes, there definitely is discrimination to be found, although typically it's not as overt as IBM's age discrimination.

Talking about age discrimination in particular, it's difficult since often older hires may not have the shiny new skill on their resumes or may have something indicating that this person may not be keeping up with tech (the bias). One of the weirdest things about joining a startup is realizing that 98% of engineers are in their 30s or 20s, while not having any engineers in their 50s, 60s or 70s.

> By that logic, surely every interview practice is justified?

In a sense, they are. As long as the interview practice is well understood by the applicants, it only leads to filtering the applicants that cannot pursue the requirements for that practice. Granted, the FAANG interview process and filtering only works because the SWE jobs are desirable enough.

I understand that the required practices and filtering also lead to a certain type of applicant. This is the main fault of the system (the lack of diversity potential).

Without the tenacity to build a wooden boat I would never hire a programmer. How would they demonstrate that tenacity? Through a series of open ended questions in an interview.

> I could ask a programmer to build a wooden boat, become a proficient opera singer, or complete four marathons in a year.

You could, but you would get better results by posing more relevant challenges.

If you ask them to become singers, you'd get a whole lot of people with great voices, who may or may not be good engineers.

At least coding solutions to DSA problems has a fairly high (though not perfect) correlation with being a good programmer.

You can't hire, or even interview, everyone. If you pick some random skill that a reasonable subset of programmers have, then it's entirely plausible that being good at it will correlate with programming skill and supply a population large enough to hire from. But that won't provide you any shelter if it has disparate impact on protected classes.