Why are interviews harder than the job?

Jm2c but interviews tell you absolutely none, nothing, about what kind of a professional the candidate is.

I have no clue whether he'll care and help or pretend to work and drag everybody else down.

There's a huge number of incredibly capable developers who could pass any interview but then spend days playing video games and sabotaging projects and teams.

I really don't believe in technical interviews, I'd rather base the relationship on trust, if you tell me you're good/experienced at X I trust you to be. If it was bs you'll be shown the door with ease.

Instead many companies make it insanely hard to get you hired, but also incredibly hard to cut you out even if you're impact is a very net negative.

This works very well for contractors, less so for full-time employees. You can't just fire somebody on a whim, at least not for free, not even in the US, let alone in most of Europe.

To be clear, I'm not saying worker protections are bad, just that if firing is much more expensive than hiring, you can't really afford to hire any warm body that walks through the door. These days everyone and their mother is in CS, there are many more talented people than ever, but also more duds than ever.

IME: the only valuable signal comes from direct personal referals. If you have someone who you think is good, and they recommend someone who they say is good from a previous engagement, odds are it will work out. There's a transitive, holistic measure in play; they're not going to destroy their reputation by recommending a weak player or even a strong jerk. The problem here is scale (you quickly milk direct networks dry) but nothing else seems to work well.

> firing is much more expensive than hiring

It's the reason why most jobs, even in Europe, have a probation period. During this oeriod firing is inexpensive. In my current employment the probation period was 6 months.

If in 6 months you still can't figure out if a hire was good or not, interviewing won't save you.

> firing is much more expensive than hiring

So... The solution is putting your most senior people doing week-long interview rounds for each candidate?

> Jm2c but interviews tell you absolutely none, nothing, about what kind of a professional the candidate is.

With the caveat that I have not been on the hiring side of things myself, my feeling about this is that it can—if a) the person you're interviewing is acting fully in good faith, b) they're not the type of person who gets so nervous about interviews that it skews their whole personality temporarily, and c) your interview process is actually decently-designed (I don't think leetcode or any type of "gotcha"-questions will give you a good picture of how professional a candidate is, nor will an interview for any kind of technical position designed entirely by nontechnical people with no domain input).

The big, big problem is the genuinely small proportion of people who come into a job interview in bad faith, seeking not to demonstrate but to hide their true skill and personality, because (rightly or wrongly) they believe it will hinder their chances of a good position.

Yes, you can even in Europe where you have high protections like in Italy, there's a probation period. Standard is 3 months, higher seniority can be even 6.

It's also the reason why e.g. Italians don't change jobs for 10/20% higher salary, you don't want to go through probation.