Some really good points. I don’t necessarily find interviews that stressful, having spent a fair amount of time contracting, they become more tiresome than actually stressful (like anything you’ve done too much of). But the most tiresome part is answering irrelevant questions. You’ve listed some common types of questions outside the area of expertise, I’ll add the most common one I come across, which is to ask an object oriented developer to construct a complex relational query in SQL. Aside from SQL not being my area of expertise, it’s a completely different way of thinking about a problem. Which gets to your second point, the way people think about a problem is one of the most crucial things to ascertain (after you’ve ascertained that they can actually think at all, and by think, I do not mean rationalize), and interviewers in general are hopeless at it. The result is not just frustration in the interview, which even for those who for whatever reason do a lot of contract work, is only a small part of a career. The far worse issue is doing the job itself well and enjoying it, when other developers find thinking a chore and the architectural and technical leads feel threatened by it. The inevitable result is software that is on average of dubious quality, and no signs that that is going to improve anytime soon.