We only hire the trendiest
Daniel Kahneman talks about an idea called substitution in his book Thinking Fast and Slow that I think really applies here.  Here&#x27;s the jist:  When your brain is faced with doing a task that&#x27;s going to require a lot of glucose it will look for shortcuts to save you energy.  One of those shortcuts is your mind will look for an available heuristic, swap out the energy hungry analysis for the heuristic, and then signal your conscious mind that you did all the analytical hard work.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;erikreads.files.wordpress.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;04&#x2F;thinking-fast-and-slow-book-summary.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;erikreads.files.wordpress.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;04&#x2F;thinking-fast-...</a><p>I think the truth of that matter is, most of us (myself included), don&#x27;t know how to interview people well.  Interviewing is really hard.  Rather than doing the hard work by researching the subject and testing ideas, most of us try to imitate successful companies much in the same way the Melanesian cargo cults imitated the construction of airfields and air traffic control towers to lure back that wonderful cargo.<p>I suspect we like to tell ourselves that we&#x27;re more analytical because our work can demand rigorous precision.  More often than not, I find we developers tend to select heuristics that indirectly test a person on how similar they are to ourselves or people we aspire to be like.  Then again, I&#x27;m probably making a broad generalization.