> It goes even further than the "difficult to work with" vibes. If someone has 20+ years of experience and hundreds of interviews under their belts, they ought to know about candidate caliber variability and the meaning of standardization practices, aka why interview panels are setup the way they are.
Most interview panels are setup badly. Most interviewers are biased. Many technical people doing interviews just want to make themselves look smart.
A company shouldn't have one interview process, they should have several. Some do well with live coding, some do well with take-home assignments, others do well with pair-programming. All are valid ways to show skill. And each can also be something that makes the candidate incredibly uncertain and stressed.
> As an interviewer, I might even entertain the idea of going along w/ said "two-way interview" charade
It is always a two-way interview. It's not a charade. You sound extremely entitled and elitist just by saying that. The candidate has 5 other offers waiting for them that aren't being a pain in the rear like you.
Don't "entertain the idea", you are applying to the candidate as much as the candidate is applying to the company you work for. Get over yourself.
> Most interview panels are setup badly. Most interviewers are biased. Many technical people doing interviews just want to make themselves look smart.
I'm surprised you're saying this in such a one-sided way, since you claim to interview candidates. I interview as a candidate too just like anyone else, so itemizing interview process problems is preaching to the choir. But IMHO it's disingenuous to ignore that candidates cheat, that college kids putting 10 hours on a take home assignment are very different than mother-of-three w/ 10 years experience, that bad interviewing on the part of my peers leads to me picking up someone else's slack later, and that generally speaking interview sessions are uncomfortable scenarios for everyone, no matter the format, much like code formatting styles never fully pleases everyone.
If you've been involved in defining interviewing standards, surely you must be aware that having several interview processes is even harder than standardizing on a single process: there are issues of interviewer qualification, calibration, throughput, interest, attrition, and other fun logistics things to think about. Saying every company should bend over backwards and have master interviewers fully calibrated in six different interviewing methodologies, at scale, at all times, is really not any more reasonable than a company expecting every candidate to bang out bubble sort in 30 minutes or take 10 hour take home assignments or whatever. And letting people do whatever is how you get to the Apple horror stories you see elsewhere in this comment section.
The thing about people having other options lined up goes both ways, really. Just as candidates have other options lined up, companies also have candidates lined up. In mine, HR literally needs to be mindful to not flood people w/ too many interviews each week.
> It is always a two-way interview
Oh I fully agree with the spirit here, but there is also a thing called tact. I don't go on pissing contests w/ my candidates as an interviewer and I don't go disrespecting an interviewer's time by saying "you know what, you don't know how to interview me, let me show you how I do it to you" (and yes, I believe this is tactless behavior from the perspective of myself being a candidate). If my awareness of industry standards is me being a hard-ass in your mind, I don't know what to tell you. Industry standards are what they are, ad-hoc and imperfect as they may be, and at least I try to understand the problem space and make the process better rather than just being passive aggressive about it like so many interviewing-related threads are.
When I say "I might entertain the idea", unlike sibling comments here I do actually mean exactly that: if you think you can show your skills better that way than my planned interview structure, by all means, go ahead and show me, but when I say "charade", I also mean that: I'm still evaluating you just as you are evaluating me, and if you think I'm evaluating whether "you're as smart as me(tm)", you've got the wrong impression. If your strategy as a candidate is to talk my ears off, I'm certainly open to it as an interviewer. I have had sessions like this from both sides. I'm familiar enough with this interviewing trick and how "talkers-who-dont-walk" abuse it. To be clear, I'm not saying you're one of those, but that as an interviewer, one needs to be aware of bad faith actors, and it's one of the reasons many interviewers cringe at the thought of "curveballs" like the one you suggested.
Most interview panels are setup badly. Most interviewers are biased. Many technical people doing interviews just want to make themselves look smart.
A company shouldn't have one interview process, they should have several. Some do well with live coding, some do well with take-home assignments, others do well with pair-programming. All are valid ways to show skill. And each can also be something that makes the candidate incredibly uncertain and stressed.
> As an interviewer, I might even entertain the idea of going along w/ said "two-way interview" charade
It is always a two-way interview. It's not a charade. You sound extremely entitled and elitist just by saying that. The candidate has 5 other offers waiting for them that aren't being a pain in the rear like you.
Don't "entertain the idea", you are applying to the candidate as much as the candidate is applying to the company you work for. Get over yourself.