I think you make some good points about the human part of the hiring process. Things happen - and hiring managers are often in a lot of meetings that run over.
But as someone who's been on both sides of the loop, I have very little faith in the hiring practices at them. And it comes down to something you said:
> What I'm saying is there is no spit or polish to the hiring process
This is totally unacceptable in my opinion. Devs spend months (or years) of prep to pass 1-2 days of rigorous whiteboarding, but HR can't work out a schedule and send emails / make phone calls properly? And don't even get me started about the shitshow that is the onboarding process at these megacorps. And these processes being total shitshows makes the failures intentional.
These processes are exactly the kind of thing I target for refinement. The process should be documented, it should be robust, and it should make things better for everyone involved.
I agree with you as an engineer. I disagree with you as a human being. Why be so formal during the interview process when the actual working environment will be anything but?
If they can tolerate the ridiculousness of the interview process, then they might be able to tolerate the ridiculousness of actually working there.
Ask anyone who's worked at any of these companies, and they'll tell you it's pretty fucking ridiculous a majority of the time. Even at the very biggest companies, IT shoots from the hip, and boy(!) does the interview process reflect that.
If we built houses the way we build software, the entire world would be homeless.
That is a ridiculous cop-out. Dev work is very regimented for many of us; we have a half dozen regular agile meetings, deployment schedules, etc. The process for code getting accepted and deployed is well-established.
It's very easy to establish a standard response time for getting back to candidates or tell them when you're going to make a selection, and to communicate and enforce a timeline for things like sending and signing documents. I could literally automate most of the process.
But as someone who's been on both sides of the loop, I have very little faith in the hiring practices at them. And it comes down to something you said:
> What I'm saying is there is no spit or polish to the hiring process
This is totally unacceptable in my opinion. Devs spend months (or years) of prep to pass 1-2 days of rigorous whiteboarding, but HR can't work out a schedule and send emails / make phone calls properly? And don't even get me started about the shitshow that is the onboarding process at these megacorps. And these processes being total shitshows makes the failures intentional.
These processes are exactly the kind of thing I target for refinement. The process should be documented, it should be robust, and it should make things better for everyone involved.