Companies seem to be adding more screening steps to try to reduce their false positive rate -- the rate at which they interview people who aren't hireable.

But most don't seem to understand that mathematically, there's a tradeoff for a higher false negative rate.

Screening false negatives are people who would have done well in an interview, but don't make it to that stage. These are more hidden to the company because the interview never happens, but quite expensive for the hiring process, and painful for people who are wrongly rejected. If we put this in probabilistic terms, I hope we can have a deeper conversation about what's happening and how this issue impacts engineers.