Technical people are really bad at hiring because they expect that what they know is “general knowledge” and what anyone else knows is some special case.

When in reality, the technical world is so broad that nearly everything is a special case.

I’ve been to a good number of interviews lately and most interviewers are like this. It’s usually some irrelevant trivia questions covering what the interviewer has worked on most recently, thus what they consider “general knowledge,” with nothing of substance on which any decision should be made.

When I conduct an interview, I generally shock candidates by asking no technical questions at all. They are irrelevant. If I can’t tell that you’re technical in a regular conversation about the field and the work, then asking trivia questions won’t help.

Interviews are a terrible way for deciding who to hire anyway, but most people make them less useful than they could be.

I don’t really have a good solution that most businesses would accept since random hiring after some minimal qualification evaluation seems too risky, but I’d like to try that in the real world sometime.