I'm not sure arrogance factors in. If you compare interviews now with just five years ago it's like night and day. It used to be a short phone interview then an onsite. That's it. It was relatively quick and easy on both sides. It was also unreliable.
The flood of unqualified candidates into the job pool has made the task of sifting through resumes and talking to potential candidates far more time consuming. The time requirement alone has made the old way of interviewing untenable.
The hoops are a way for companies to limit their time investment and reduce perceived risk. Unfortunately, it doesn't work. It alienates the very candidates they want to attract while doing nothing to deter the unqualified and it isn't any more reliable at telling us who's qualified than the old method was.
Agree that adding more tests and interview is self defeating, but I wouldn't be so sure that there are many more candidates? It's not like the number of CS students has gone up X00%. Visas are harder to come by as well.
OTOH Mozilla is remote, so there have literally the whole world sending over CVs.
It's not just CS degree students who are applying. Code camps are pumping out junior programmers who are applying to every job listing they can find. It used to be you sifted through 10 resumes before finding 1 good one. I'm told that number has increased to 100 to find 1 good one.
Now, I don't know for sure if that's hyperbole or not, but that's the impression I'm getting from talking to hiring managers.
I interviewed with google last month. I met like ~20 people who were also interviewing at google at the hotel breakfast. Some of them said they have been prepping for the interview everyday for past 4 months ( didn't help with my confidence :)).
Reception at google was filled with 100s of people waiting for their turn to be picked up. And this was just one building among of many, many buildings.
Lady at the reception at Avis car rental told me that they get 100's of people coming everyday for interview at google.
It was bizzare and surreal to experience 'interview industrial complex' first hand.
Heavens. Doesn't Google see what's happening here?
All they've managed to bring forth with their epic hiring process (now the de-facto gold standard, worldwide) is an epic... arms race. The higher they set their "bar", the more desperately people will cram their heads full of Boyer-Moore, A*, and countless other algorithms they (and their interviewers) couldn't otherwise begin to care about.
Other than Avis, Airbnb, and the local hotels, it's hard to imagine who could realistically benefit from such theater.
Every agent in an arms race is behaving rationally, from their perspective. The only solution is cooperation, but corporations have less incentive to cooperate than, say, nation-states.
In Israel there is an HR as a service company for early stage startups, that succeeds in bring really good talent. They choose startups wisely, their employees actually work in that startup shoulder to shoulder with the developers (especially to avoid backward linkedin interaction) and they recommend good candidates that had issues in/with one company to try and fit in another. This makes everyone happy. They also have a good name so they have connections with good head hunters, friends of friends, manager's linkedin profile access.
Their main problem is that their hr specialist take a long time to train, and since stationed in good startups they might want to become a FullTime employee themselves, instead of switching to a new startup as the existing one grows too big.
I've been thinking of starting something similar here in the states (recruiting as a service), but there's always one problem: small companies don't trust anything labeled 'recruiting' or 'hr' to gauge technical talent.
If I can come up with a reliable, repeatable system for identifying good developers, I still have to convince other companies to pay for it. The skepticism I get from companies is off the charts.
Do you know how the "HR as a service" company gets around that? Maybe that's why they embed their employees in the startup (face time generates trust)? I don't see them lasting long, though, for the exact reason you state: they're setting themselves up for high training costs and high turnover.
I don't know how they bootstrapped, but startups in Israel have repeatably same problems. Good technology, not so good business leadership, and zero hr skills. It's a known issue, that founders seek help with the minute they start interviewing people and getting frustrated from the pipeline, or the candidate reactions. This company (called 'added value') is unique since it provides a precise solution to that stage in a startups life and they phase out when you get to a certain size, helping the startup hire full time hr. They deliver results, and word travels fast.
Interviewing can take up a noticeable number of developer hours precisely when a team needs more of them. I suspect they're trying to cut down on the number of full day interviews needed. Too often, it's clear within minutes that a person isn't a match.
Or maybe they're reacting to how little we can learn from a single interview by adding more hoops. Either way, it's a broken system. If anyone has a solution, I'll build it :)
Funny you should mention that. Are you aware with how Matasano interviews[0][1]? It sounds like they pretty much figured out a 'moneyball' strategy. But, like any other type of system, it took time to develop.
Unfortunately, I don't see any companies going in that direction. Every company I've spoken to, from huge corporations to tiny startups, treat technical interviewing as an afterthought. Which can be funny and surreal in an Orwellian way, considering the big companies have very well defined systems for non-technical interviewing. So everything will be running like a swiss watch until it comes time to test your technical knowledge, then it's treated as one big unknowable wild card.
[0]: Or used to interview. They were bought out by the NCC Group and I have no idea how they go about things.
Not quite sure myself as I am currently on the receiving end :D.
I would say this though that, 4 screens, hackerrank, take home coding, onsite format is not limited to big tech companies. I've had to do that for local smaller shops too.
Anectodally, it seems to be a lot worse in the US. But why would it ? I would have thought the competition for great engineers is highest there. Humiliating them is not the best strategy...
The pay is high in the States. Many companies are willing to pay a steep premium for slightly stronger employees, and the candidates are more willing to jump through hoops to land a higher-paying job.
Not the whole story of course, but might be a factor.
Or are software engineers, in average, getting more arrogant these days ? (_genuine_ question I've had for some time now)