> There's a lot of anger in this thread at companies for making obvious choices.

Elsecomment and on Reddit, you'll see the attitude that their years of experience should be sufficient assurance for their prospective employer that they can pick up whatever other technologies are out there.

This is often coupled with the "you shouldn't need to learn new things outside of your 9-5."

Here, you are presenting a situation where a company would rather promote from within (counter job hopping culture) and would penalize someone who is not learning about new things that their current employer isn't using in the hiring process.

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And you've mentioned it elsecomment too - it's about the risk. A company hiring an individual who isn't familiar with the technology and has not shown the ability to learn new material is more risky a hire than one who is either familiar with it professionally or has demonstrated the ability to learn new technologies.

That runs counter to the idea of the "best" candidate being the one who is most skilled but rather the "best" candidate being the one that is the least risky of a hire.

The whole thing is this perfect candidate doesn’t exist. How can they? You are dealing with imperfect information. A resume, yours and theirs assumptions about eachother. That is it. All the interview hoops attempts to make ourselves the hirer comfortable with the fact we are fundamentally taking a leap of faith. Because n=1. Because we aren’t simulating this hire 1000 times and modelling the distribution of performance. Because we haven’t accounted for all latent factors that may intersect between our work model and the hiree. Because we can’t ever know anything at all about the future for certain.

I think we could all be a little more mindful of that in hiring. That waiting for perfection is itself a fallacy for all these reasons and plenty more.

You probably don't realize that there are several thousands of people without a job who could work for a company that is instead just "waiting years" to find an imaginary worker. That's what people complain about. The more companies think the way you do, the more useless open positions are listed because companies will not hire anyone unless it's the perfect candidate in their dreams.

I have to say I appreciate your aplomb in these responses. The whole thread is littered with shocking (and unsurprising?) tech-bro overconfidence that they can manage a situation they literally know nothing about better than someone who's already done it. Cheers to you and have a good weekend.