Most of those interview questions, don&#x27;t really have much to do with the way someone actually works. I just went through one of those SV gauntlets at a YC startup, and got a yes, but at no point I thought any of the interviews were any good: Not enough time to actually learn about the interviewer, or solve a problem that a recent graduate couldn&#x27;t solve. I know some awesome people that wouldn&#x27;t have passed my interview, and I know people I&#x27;d never want to work with that would have passed.<p>The whole thing made me see why the situation in SV is so screwed up: If we can&#x27;t really ask for things that show real experience levels, and it&#x27;s all about short term first impressions, set by interviewers that aren&#x27;t even necessarily any good at interviewing, how can we improve?<p>I&#x27;ve always much preferred interviews that asked for the same amount of time, but where people could show a picture of their real output, instead of a little puzzle.<p>Imagine you are hiring a chef to man your restaurant, and what you ask him to do is get through Chopped: Give him secret ingredients, and ask to make a dish using all of them in 15-20 minutes. You&#x27;ll be testing something: Some people will do better than others. But are the things you are testing really going to matter, in practice, when what a chef really has to do quickly is to execute a well known, practiced menu, along with kitchen management skills?<p>We don&#x27;t test for the things we do at jobs, and therefore, we can&#x27;t hire. Not a surprise.