Technical Interviews Are Hazing Rituals We Keep Because We Survived Them
Technical interviews do not predict job performance. We have known this for years. Study after study shows that whiteboard coding, algorithm puzzles, and system design interrogations have almost no correlation with how well someone actually does the job. We keep doing them anyway. Why? Because we went through them. We suffered. We ground LeetCode for months. We memorised sorting algorithms we have never used professionally. We practiced answering questions about designing Twitter’s backend despite never working at that scale. We did the hazing, and now it is our turn to haze.