> company/tech/what-have-you 'culture' which, imo, is simply a euphemism for ageism, in-group bias, prejudice, hubris, and one-upmanship more often than not.

In my experience working with a couple of wildly different companies who prided themselves on "culture", it's largely just "don't be a dick".

It's still important though.

And yet when a company tries to reduce a candidate to a consistent set of objective criteria as best it can--meaning, the ability to understand programming problems and solve them in a structured interview--people get upset because it doesn't account for the "big picture" of the candidate and unfairly excludes people who'd otherwise be a great fit.

The reality is that any interview procedure is bound to have some false positives and some false negatives, and there will always be people who see themselves as false negatives (correctly and incorrectly) who'll complain loudly about any procedure.

If it were only true or false negatives complaining, that would be one thing. But lots of the complaining also comes from true positives. I've gotten every tech job I've interviewed for since college, and have usually been quite successful in the companies I've worked for. I think all of those interviews were evaluating me on the wrong metric. They evaluated something I also happen to be relatively good at - I have a CS background and I'm ok at contrived little programming problems - but I believe the companies just got lucky that I'm actually even better at the kinds of things that are important in my work - problem analysis, solution design, consensus seeking, teamwork, communication, writing, debugging, research, detail orientation, automation, process definition, etc. etc. etc. - none of which has any real overlap with writing little code snippets.

All of those things, though, are inherently hard to test in a way that's fair, representative, and not easily cheated. Anyone who had a reproducible, consistent way to evaluate which candidates are good at those things would be able to make a whole lot of money.

I don't disagree, but that also doesn't mean coding interviews like we do them now are the best alternative.

Heh. The last couple time I've seen a candidate rejected for "poor culture fit", it was because the candidate themselves demonstrated ageism or racism.

Racism as in speaking up against reverse racism?

Unfortunately, no. Explicit racism: making negative assertions about specific races. During the interview. :|

First I was going to express disbelief that any candidate would think that was OK to do. But somebody could be a racist trying to find a racist employer that accepts that kind of talk. Weird & wrong, but rational, and probably something they do all the time in other parts of their life.

Then I had the outlandish idea that the local employment opportunity office is getting especially gung-ho and sending decoys through the pipeline. That would be a fun job. Basically getting paid to be a shock comedian who bombs every time.