The Last Technical Interview. Today we will pour one out for the… | by Steve Yegge | May, 2026 | MediumSitemapOpen in appSign up<br>Sign in

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The Last Technical Interview

Steve Yegge

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Today we will pour one out for the vaunted technical interview process, which is on its last leg. And we’ll talk a little about what’s replacing it.<br>This post has been almost 35 years in the making; that’s how long I have been conducting technical interviews. And for a few of those decades, I also worked to try to improve the process itself. I’ve had to care a lot about it, because it’s so broken.<br>It turns out interviewing was broken long before I learned the trade, and despite the many attempts to band-aid it, it’s still broken today. It has managed to survive in spite of that. But it is finally dying on its own. People are a bit unclear on what’s next, so we’ll talk about some of our options.<br>But it’s not an easy path I bring you, no silver bullet. Remember that, grasshopper, when you get to the end and come back to yell at me.<br>The Two Big Dogs<br>Back at Amazon, we had this elite group, the Bar Raisers, which I hear is similar to a role at Microsoft they call As-Appropriate (AA). In both cases, a trusted interviewer (the BR/AA) is assigned to every interview loop, and has the power to veto any unqualified people the interviewers try to sneak through. I was a BR, and also part of “Bar Raisers Core”: a small group Bezos and Dalzell tasked with defining the BR role itself, choosing new bar raisers, training them, and reporting on the program’s efficacy.<br>The BR and AA roles are a tacit acknowledgement that you can’t trust your interview teams to make good hiring decisions. Which even more broadly, suggests that if every single interview loop needs a babysitter, then it is a flawed process. But we were doing our best.<br>Of course we don’t frame it as babysitting, naturally. We cheerlead and rah-rah about keeping a “high hiring bar.” And BR/AA aren’t the end of it. There are tons of other interview process band-aids, all variations on how you conduct four to six interviews in a single day. Everything revolves around fitting the assessment into a single round or two of interviews. That part never changes.<br>None of these band-aids really help — we still all hire tons of false positives (unqualified) and turn away false negatives (actually qualified), despite every attempt to make the process perfect, or even good.<br>The reality is that talent evaluation, a corner of our industry that hasn’t changed much in five-ish decades, is embarrassingly busted. It just doesn’t work that well in practice.<br>The people who know this best, and who feel it most day to day, and who ultimately have the least power to change it, are all in HR. The tech side of the tech industry doesn’t want to change it because of inertia: the process has worked just barely well enough all these years to resist an overhaul. So all HR can do is show us how bad it is, and then try to do damage control when it fails. I’ll share an amazing story about this in the next section.<br>After Amazon, I kept on trying to improve the interviewing process while I was at Google. I spent years on Google Kirkland’s “Hiring Committee”, where we processed thousands of Microsoft résumés, would-be escapees from over the hill in Redmond. I published a 30-page internal résumé screening guide. I even wrote a blog post, Get That Job At Google, which is still handed out by Google recruiters, seventeen years later. I took this stuff pretty seriously back then!<br>In short, there is very little that I don’t know about the tech-assessment business. And I’m about to pull a Kitchen Confidential on it.<br>This post comes with a diagnosis and a prescription. But the important part is the diagnosis. I want to convince you that we need a radical change in how we assess people, and that tech interviews are on their last leg.<br>Let’s see how well I do. As for the solution, we can figure that out once we agree that it’s a problem.<br>Remember That Time We All Fired Ourselves?<br>The outcomes from interviewing are statistically terrible. Google did wave upon wave of analysis over the years, and all the results were incredibly depressing.<br>To name just a few off the top of my head: interviewers barely agreed with each other. Put the same candidate in front of two of our sharpest people and you’d routinely get a confident “strong hire” from one and a flat “no” from the other. There’s no oracle interviewer, not even Jeff Dean.<br>And once people were actually on the job, their interview scores told you next to nothing about how they’d do — at least the way we ran the loops. Hell, some of our star performers failed their Google interviews four or five times, finally got in after 2+ years, and then outshone everyone else.<br>Interviewing, it turns out, is a big game of darts. A “do I like you” dating round.<br>All we could find at Google, from all the...