Why are interviews harder than the job?

A major issue the author missed is it is much harder to fire a non-performer in the tech industry today.

It takes 2 quarters (ie. 6 months) to go from recognizing a problem employee to firing said employee.

This makes the risk of hiring the wrong candidate significant as a hiring manager, because a bad hire reflects badly on you and eats up your budget thus preventing a backfill.

On top of that, firing individual employees can lead to litigation risk (even if frivolous), thus requiring hiring managers to go through the extreme song and dance of the PIP process and documented reprimands in order to provide counsel if litigated.

Yet I have met very few truly bad engineers in my life. Most of the "bad" ones were not bad in skills, but a bad match due to their willingness to die on one hill or another and complete refusal to work with others.

Yet, most of the interviews put way too little focus on the soft skills and way too much focus on the hard skills.

hard skills are difficult enough to try and assess; soft skills even harder. Most try with behavioural questions which have very little signal IMO. I'm a senior manager / director now so most interviews focus on softer skills. My strategy is to give very concrete examples to the "tell me about a time" style questions. Every other answer is easily forgettable.

In what companies are you speaking of? In Silicon Valley, we fire people very quickly as soon as notice it’s not a correctable problem. Hell, sometimes even when it is correctable.