I've been working in the industry for 25 years. I've never received even 5 minutes of training on how to interview people, yet I've been asked to interview people dozens of times. This is everywhere from small companies up to huge Fortune 100 companies. The skill set to be an effective programmer and to be an effective interviewer are not the same. But, I don't do interviewing often enough that I've felt the need to seek out specific training on how to do it. So I basically end up winging it when I'm asked to participate in another interview.

Before you're allowed to interview candidates at Amazon, you have to complete a full-day course on how to interview. It covers the kinds of questions you should be asking, potential pitfalls, and what contributes to a hire/no hire decision.

The most important lesson in interviewing I've learnt is to shut up. If you're doing the talking you're not learning about the candidate. Say as little as possible, if they ask good followup questions they will figure stuff out (see also above comment about curiosity).

One of my most frustrating interview experiences was when the lead engineer constantly interrupted me in the middle of my answers, clearly looking to get an answer that confirmed his existing opinions, then stopped the interview because we were out of time. He didn’t let me finish answering a single question, then rejected me because my technical knowledge was “too shallow”. I’m glad I never had to work with the guy.

This seems wrong, generally my groups try to strategize a little as we are getting together to discuss the candidate. making sure we actually covered the important stuff, how to press on soft spots, etc.

It’s group work just like everything else. slowly mix in junior people to train them, but make sure there are enough senior interviewers to make sure we make a decent evaluation.

When I worked at BT in the UK you had to do a 2.5 day residential course and pass it before you where allowed to interview people.

It reflects that they might not do interviews so well, but it just doesn’t seem to say anything worth extrapolating to your day to day at that company. Some of the best jobs I’ve had were at companies where engineers ruled and also were the ones sucking at conducting interviews. At those places it was almost a good signal that the interviews sucked. A group of people solving interesting problems, not optimizing for applicant comfort in an interview. Oh well.

There is research on how to do interviews. So if they don't know how to interview, it is clear the company isn't big on doing things in the best way.

The above may or may not be good, but it is a signal.

I think part of the problem is interviewers at companies are (a) not properly trained to be interviewers, just pulled from their jobs and asked to interview some candidate on short notice (b) funneled into a certain way of interviewing that isn't optimal.

Large companies have almost always given me the traditional "coding a whiteboard" interview and nitpicked for the whole hour at things that would be irrelevant for the job. Many interviewers approached me with an attitude of "I'm smarter than you and I need to figure out at what point I can outsmart you" rather than trying to discover "How are your abilities complimentary and useful to the team" i.e. "What do you do well that my colleagues and I don't do well, or could use help on".

This was basically my experience on both sides of the process (with a major exception when I interviewed for my current job). I learned from both. On the interviewer side, I sat down and wrote out a framework for how to do a good interview since nobody ever gave me one and I was initially flying blind. (What am I looking for in the person who will do the role? How should I break up the time to check and validate those things?) On the interviewee side, I basically just decided any hiring manager that tries to make you feel bad/stupid almost certainly isn't worth working for. I complete those interviews and try to use them as a learning experience, and I try to exhibit grace in the face of rudeness, then I just move on with my life. It's not always pleasant and required some self-control, but I figure it's a good skill to have on its own.

> If people in a company don't know what they're doing, yet (it appears) have a deathgrip belief in the equivalent of something they found on StackOverflow or in a blog post... doesn't that reflect something about the company?

No, all that it reflects is that the company does not prioritize hiring people who interview well, or training people to interview well.

The company also probably does not prioritize hiring people who speak Finnish, or training people to speak Finnish.

Neither of these two signals are any indication that the day-to-day work environment is going to suck.

The "deathgrip" is the red flag here

I have doubts that someone stepping in for 2 hours of interviews can consistently and accurately determine whether or not the company in question is in the deathgrip of stack overflow fads and dumb blog posts.

In anything but the most egregious cases, anyone making such an assertion tells me more about themselves, than it does about their interviewers.

In the rest, the correct judgement to make after a bad interview experience is "I don't have enough information to make an accurate judgement about how this company runs."

Yeh you can - gets easier with age and experience

Unless you're going back to all these firms, to confirm your first guess, you have no idea if you are actually making good judgements, or not.