alt Hacker News> If it didn't actually work, it would've been discarded by companies long ago
You're assuming that something else works better. Imagine if we were in a world where all interviewing techniques had a ton of false positives and negatives without a clear best choice. Do you expect that companies would just give up, and not hire at all, or would they pick based on other factors (e.g. minimizing the amount of effort needed on the company side to do the interviews)? Assuming you accept the premise that companies would still be trying to hire in that situation, how can you tell the difference between the world we're in now and that (maybe not-so) hypothetical one?
I never made any claims about optimality. It works (for whatever reason) hence companies continue to use it
If it didn't work, these companies wouldn't be able to function at all.
It must be the case that it works better than running a RNG on everyone who applied.
Does it mean some genius software engineer who wrote a fundamental part of the Linux kernel but never learned about Minimum Spanning Trees got filtered out? Probably. But it's okay. That guy would've been a pain in the ass anyway.