May 29, 2026
Exit interview for interviews
The Last Technical Interview
Hiring’s weird brain-teaser ritual is dying, and the comments are cheering
TLDR: Steve Yegge says the traditional tech hiring interview is finally breaking down after decades of being unfair and unreliable. Commenters mostly cheered, joked, and swapped horror stories, though some warned the old system may not die — it could just keep limping along and making everyone miserable.
Steve Yegge just wrote a funeral notice for the classic tech job interview: the infamous gauntlet where candidates are grilled, judged, and often rejected by a process he says has been broken for decades. In his Medium post, he argues the old system is finally wobbling toward collapse, even after years of patches like elite in-house gatekeepers meant to keep standards high. Translation for normal humans: the people deciding who gets hired never really found a fair way to do it, and now even insiders are admitting the whole thing may be on its last breath.
But the real fireworks are in the comments, where readers are serving up a mix of applause, cynicism, and dark office comedy. One camp is basically dancing on the grave — “And good riddance” became the blunt rallying cry. Another group is less convinced, warning that bad systems don’t die cleanly; they just keep shambling forward like a corporate zombie. Others piled on with war stories, including one reader who said companies should test their own employees against the hiring process just to see how many would fail. Ouch.
And then came the humor: a long parrot joke about absurd pricing turned into a perfect metaphor for hiring nonsense, while another commenter dropped the iciest image of all — if you saw someone heading into the CEO’s Friday meeting, you knew they were basically entering the goodbye chamber. The mood? Fed up, fascinated, and very ready for drama.
Key Points
- •Steve Yegge says the traditional technical interview process is on its last leg after decades of persistent problems.
- •He states that he has spent nearly 35 years conducting technical interviews and working to improve the process.
- •The article argues that technical interviewing has long been broken and has survived despite repeated attempts to repair it.
- •Yegge says the current hiring system is now declining without a clearly established replacement.
- •He cites Amazon’s Bar Raiser model and Microsoft’s As-Appropriate role as examples of interviewer oversight systems with veto authority.