One of the things I miss about being an orchestral musician is that you always knew what you were getting into when you went into an audition. You've known the pool of excerpts for your instrument since you were in college; you've been working on them for years; you've probably known the excerpts for this particular audition for months if not a year.

Every one of them is the same: you go in behind a screen, and you have to play those few minutes of music better than anyone else that day. It's hard to do because they choose the hardest stuff, but you know what you're up against.

It's very imperfect. It doesn't reflect most of what you're going to be doing in the job. You might play one of those pieces in a given season. The bulk of your time is spent listening to the players around you and playing in sync with them, understanding what the conductor wants, etc. There's a lot more to being a good orchestral musician than being able to nail your part for Don Juan completely alone without context.

It's not great, but it is consistent. Evert tech interview I've had in person has been wildly different. Even since I learned pretty early on to ask about the process. You still have no idea. It can be anything from an entire dev team grilling each other in a pissing match that had almost nothing to do with me, to 1:1 with someone grilling me about the finer points of a PhD topic they just finished years studying to a casual conversation over coffee just to get to know you to live coding exercises where you have an hour to write a 3-d car driving game to a conversation with part of the team where they tell you about their real-world problems and ask you for ideas about solutions to getting paid to work on a live project. All for web developer or data engineering positions.

I remember being in one interviewer role a while back for a dev ops person for the team. I got thrown into the mix at the last minute because the other interviewers realized the day of the interview that they don't know anything about dev ops, and I kind of carried that portion of things for us. They had literally nothing to offer to the conversation, so it was unprepared me interviewing a highly competent dev ops pro. After 20 minutes, the other interviewers left and said, "I really don't know why we're here. I don't understand any of the words either one of you are using, so just carry on without us."

I felt really bad for that guy. He was really really good, and the only thing we got out of it was that the team didn't know why we were hiring for that position.

The amount of variability is truly insane. I hope that whiteboarding culture doesn't win the standardization contest because even worse than in the case of a violin audition, there really should be no performing or bravado in an engineering team.

But even standardizing around that would be an improvement over the utter chaos right now. Because then it's consistent. Perhaps misplaced, but at least consistent.

I wish that instead of teaching classes about how to win the CS technical interview, schools would teach classes about how to interview for technical roles. How to design effective interviews that will help find the best person for that role. There's a ton of research around this. It's not just "whatever seems to work for us." And we need to be better.