Hypothetically, about eight years ago, I was interviewed by a major corporation in Seattle. I will not say which one. Let’s say it’s imaginary.
TLDR; It was probably a sham interview to show that they interviewed enough people of a given demographic.
So in my home city, which is also a tech center and has some top universities, I went to a job fair held by this massive tech corporation.
I had no realistic hope of getting a job there, although I would like to think that my credentials are pretty good with BS in CS and an MSIS in Geospatial and Data Analytics.
I go to the job fair. I hand a woman my résumé and she seems overly excited to get my résumé and I’m thinking – well I think – maybe they finally just recognize how brilliant I am blah, blah, yawn.
So she says ‘these guys in the back, they want to interview you’. I go in and I expect a Google-level bullshit technical coding interview. I somewhat know how to prepare for those and I generally do fairly well except when I can’t remember the particular algorithm.
Long story short, they hit me with the ultimate softball questions like How do you do hello world in Java and give me a SQL statement so I said Select * from dual; and I’m waiting for the hard questions and these two guys decide that somehow I’m brilliant and I’ve got to be flown out to Seattle for an interview
So damned if I don’t get plane tickets to fly to Seattle. I get put up in this fantastic hotel and the interview is not till Monday so I get to spend the entire weekend from Friday morning all the way through Sunday night hanging out in Seattle.
I then go on the morning of the interview to the HQ which is actually kind of filthy with people walking their dogs in and out. There’s these very good looking young men and women at the reception. They have no idea who I am or why I am there.
Fortunately, I printed out the email to show them that I in fact had an interview – so after about 15 minutes of scrambling (I’ve run out to go get a cup of coffee – which Seattle is famous for you know).
I come back and they’re like oh yeah we’re ready now – so I go upstairs and there’s this kid he’s probably 24 years old. He is not in great shape and he is wearing a white T-shirt with yellow stains and holes in the armpits. He looks like he was interrupted from gaming.
He starts asking me a bunch of questions, and I thought that it was kind of like Full Metal Jacket where if you reverse yourself the drill sergeant will beat you harder.
So I said – that’s really the optimal way that you would do it in terms of good software engineering principle… blah, blah, blah – so I didn’t back down from my methodology.
Not sure what they were looking for, so then another disinterested hastily-drafted guy comes in and puts another question on the blackboard and he asks me a similar question. I answer it the same way because I’m not gonna back down.
We shake hands, I leave, I get back on the plane and when I get back I find my certain rejection email.
So later on, I asked this friend of mine, who was a senior person, in HR at a different major corporation that fortunately has nothing to do with tech.
She said: “Well, they needed to have a distribution in terms of race, age, ethnicity, national origin, gender, blah blah blah.
So that was hypothetically an interview to make sure that they were covered against future discrimination claims by having someone of your ilk to be brought in.
So, assume they are interviewing eight people for the position because they’re a big company. They are ranked 1st to 8th – you were probably ranked eighth but they could’ve had any other dozen people in the number eight interview slot.
They chose you so that you would fit the desired demographics so they can say – hey we interviewed so many whatever.”
Well I suppose if I’d absolutely knocked their socks off, then maybe I would’ve gotten the job.
But, it’s actually a pretty slick way to hide discrimination because what harm does it do to add in another random person in the eighth slot?