Hiring is a Broken Game: An Engineer’s Honest Review

You’ve got a decade of experience building scalable systems. Your GitHub is a testament to your passion for clean code. You’ve mentored junior developers, led complex projects, and can debug a production issue in your sleep. And you just got an automated rejection email for a role you were perfect for. The reason? Your resume was probably missing the right combination of keywords for the Applicant Tracking System (ATS) to notice you.

If this sounds familiar, you're not alone. Welcome to the modern tech hiring process—a system that often feels less like a meritocratic search for talent and more like a high-stakes game of chance. It’s a gauntlet of arbitrary puzzles, inconsistent evaluations, and communication black holes. As an engineer who has been on both sides of the interview table for over a decade, I’ve seen it all. This isn’t just a rant; it's an honest review of a fundamentally broken system and a plea for something better.

The Gauntlet Begins: Resumes and Recruiters

Before you even speak to a human, the game is afoot. Your carefully crafted resume, a summary of your professional life, is first judged not by a person, but by a machine.

The ATS Black Hole

Applicant Tracking Systems are the gatekeepers of modern recruiting. In theory, they help companies manage a high volume of applications. In practice, they often filter out highly qualified candidates. These systems scan for specific keywords and phrases from the job description. If your resume uses “CI/CD” but the job description listed “Continuous Integration,” you might get a lower score. If you describe your experience with distributed systems without using the exact term “microservices,” you might be invisible.

The result? We spend hours tailoring our resumes not to best reflect our experience, but to appease an algorithm. It’s a game of SEO, not a showcase of skill. The best resume writer often wins over the best engineer.

The Recruiter Disconnect

If you make it past the ATS, you'll likely talk to a recruiter. While many are great, some are essentially reading from a script. They might ask if you have “five years of experience with React,” a framework that has only been widely popular for about that long, effectively excluding its early adopters. They might not understand the nuance between Java and JavaScript, or why experience with AWS Lambda is relevant to a role asking for “serverless” expertise.

This initial screening often feels like a vocabulary test administered by someone who doesn't speak the language. It’s another layer of noise that prevents skilled engineers from connecting with the engineering managers who can actually assess their talent.

The "Culture Fit" Charade

“We’re sorry, but we’ve decided to move forward with other candidates who are a stronger culture fit.”

This is perhaps the most frustrating piece of feedback you can receive. What does it even mean? “Culture fit” is supposed to be about finding people who align with a company’s values—collaboration, curiosity, ownership. But too often, it’s a lazy, unconscious proxy for “is this person like me?” It becomes a filter for homogeneity, favoring people who share similar backgrounds, hobbies, or communication styles as the interviewers.

This not only leads to a lack of diversity but also fosters groupthink. The best teams are built on a diversity of thought, perspective, and experience. When “culture fit” becomes a veto card without a clear, objective rubric, it actively works against that goal. It’s a nebulous concept that allows bias to creep in under a veil of corporate jargon.

The Technical Interview Circus

This is the main event, and it’s where the process truly goes off the rails. The goal should be to answer one question: “Can this person do the job effectively?” Instead, we get a series of abstract tests that have little to do with day-to-day engineering work.

The Whiteboard Hazing

You’re standing in front of a whiteboard, a marker in your hand, with three strangers watching your every move. Your task: invert a binary tree or find the Nth-to-last element in a linked list. You have 45 minutes.

Does this scenario resemble anything about modern software development? No. Real engineering involves:

• Collaboration: We talk to our peers, bounce ideas, and work together.
• Tools: We use IDEs with syntax highlighting, linters, and debuggers.
• Research: We look up documentation and consult Stack Overflow. Forgetting the exact syntax for a `Map` in JavaScript is normal, not a sign of incompetence.
• Time: We think deeply about problems, we refactor, and we test. We don’t solve complex problems in a 45-minute sprint under extreme pressure.

Whiteboard interviews test for a very specific skill: performing computer science trivia under duress. They favor recent graduates who have just finished their algorithms course and penalize experienced engineers who haven't needed to balance a red-black tree by hand in a decade.

The Take-Home Trap

To combat the artificiality of whiteboarding, some companies use take-home assignments. This can be a great alternative, but it comes with its own set of pitfalls. A good take-home project simulates a real-world task and respects the candidate’s time. A bad one is a recipe for frustration and free labor.

Here’s how to spot the difference:

When done right, take-homes are fantastic. When done wrong, they exploit candidates and burn goodwill.

The System Design Lottery

For senior roles, the system design interview is crucial. “Design Twitter.” “Design a URL shortener.” This can be the best part of the process, as it closely mirrors the high-level thinking required for senior engineering. However, it can also become a lottery. The quality of this interview depends almost entirely on the interviewer.

A good interviewer guides the conversation, focuses on trade-offs, and seeks to understand your thought process. A bad interviewer has a specific, "correct" architecture in mind and is just waiting for you to guess it. They may fixate on trivial details or fail to steer you back on track if you go down a different-but-equally-valid path. You can ace a system design interview with one person and fail it with another on the very same day, for the very same role.

A Better Way? Fixing the Broken Game

It’s easy to criticize, but what’s the solution? The good news is that many companies are already experimenting with better approaches. Fixing the broken game isn't about finding one perfect method, but about adhering to better principles.

1. Test for a Job, Not for a Degree: Instead of abstract algorithm puzzles, use practical assessments. Pair programming on a realistic bug or a small feature is an excellent way to see how a candidate thinks, codes, and collaborates.
2. Structure Everything: To combat bias, interviews must be structured. Every candidate should be asked similar questions, and their answers should be evaluated against a pre-defined rubric. Vague feedback like “not a culture fit” should be banned in favor of specific, behavioral observations tied to the company’s values.
3. Respect the Candidate’s Time: Keep take-home assignments short and focused. If you need more than 4 hours of a candidate’s time, you should pay them for it. This shows you value their expertise and are serious about a fair process.
4. Train Your Interviewers: Interviewing is a skill. Companies must invest in training their engineers on how to conduct effective, unbiased, and empathetic interviews. An interviewer’s job is to get a signal, not to feel smart.
5. Be Transparent: Tell candidates exactly what the process looks like, what you’re evaluating at each stage, and provide constructive feedback whenever possible. The hiring process is the first, and most critical, impression a candidate has of your company. Don't make it a negative one.

Conclusion: It's Time for a Change

The current state of tech hiring is a disservice to everyone involved. It frustrates and alienates talented engineers, introduces bias, and ultimately fails to reliably identify the best candidates for the job. We, as engineers, have built the very systems that run the world, yet we tolerate a hiring process that is often illogical and inefficient.

It’s time for a change. As candidates, we should push back against unreasonable demands and advocate for processes that respect our skills and time. As interviewers and hiring managers, we have a responsibility to design and implement a fairer, more effective, and more human system. The goal isn’t to find someone who can win a broken game; it’s to find a great future colleague.