You're on to something here. There's the specific, need-based interview, and there's the "sure, we're always looking for talent" interview.
The latter can lead to an unintended problem. I once went on an interview where I was passed from room to room, on the hour, and taken through my technical paces each time. Each interview was intensely technical. If my interview had been my only exposure to the company (i.e., I hadn't gone to the site, read press releases and articles, and so forth), I would have no idea what the company does, other than that it seems to involve operations-research style math (optimization and stochastic processes), data structures and algorithms, and complex sql. I certainly would have no idea what they planned on having me do from a business point of view. I didn't get an offer (was busy, hadn't adequately refreshed my knowledge of tree traversal, markov chains, and linear optimization to immediate post-exam undergrad/grad levels), but I wasn't hot on the company anyway, because it left me with the impression that they wouldn't value my business input in any way.
So, why would they do this? Maybe they're just sort of looking generally for people. They figure, eh, if we find candidates who can rock an exam[1], sure, let's go ahead and make an offer, I'm sure we'll find something for them to do. Because their need isn't immediate, their standards (no false positives) will be set unusually high.
The unintended consequence is that yet another developer in this space is now reluctant to interview, because who wants to prepare for and re-take their undergraduate/graduate math and CS exams?
[1] At this point, I don't even think we should call this an interview, it was an exam that lasted longer than my MS graduate exams, with far less information about what would be tested.
The latter can lead to an unintended problem. I once went on an interview where I was passed from room to room, on the hour, and taken through my technical paces each time. Each interview was intensely technical. If my interview had been my only exposure to the company (i.e., I hadn't gone to the site, read press releases and articles, and so forth), I would have no idea what the company does, other than that it seems to involve operations-research style math (optimization and stochastic processes), data structures and algorithms, and complex sql. I certainly would have no idea what they planned on having me do from a business point of view. I didn't get an offer (was busy, hadn't adequately refreshed my knowledge of tree traversal, markov chains, and linear optimization to immediate post-exam undergrad/grad levels), but I wasn't hot on the company anyway, because it left me with the impression that they wouldn't value my business input in any way.
So, why would they do this? Maybe they're just sort of looking generally for people. They figure, eh, if we find candidates who can rock an exam[1], sure, let's go ahead and make an offer, I'm sure we'll find something for them to do. Because their need isn't immediate, their standards (no false positives) will be set unusually high.
The unintended consequence is that yet another developer in this space is now reluctant to interview, because who wants to prepare for and re-take their undergraduate/graduate math and CS exams?
[1] At this point, I don't even think we should call this an interview, it was an exam that lasted longer than my MS graduate exams, with far less information about what would be tested.