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Also note that the "easier" interviews are from companies that are less competitive/less established. So their offers are going to be lower not because the candidate comes off as less qualified, but because they just don't have the money to pay their employees the 120K+ salaries. So that graphic is also misleading.

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This hasn't been my experience in general. Most of my hard interviews were at startups. To sound old and jaded, I think a lot of it has to do with the startup mentality "we only hire the top 0.0001% of coders " . Once you've been in the business for years you realize the fallacy of that thinking and try to hire good coders with a focus on finding people fun to work with.

Most big companies I applied at had about half of the grilling and the rest of the interview was "culture fit"

I'm a bit jaded about startups myself and I'm not even 30. The couple I worked in seemed like "we are so smart" cults, which drove me absolutely nuts. The people working there were smart, but their definition of intelligence was narrow-minded. I find it very unlikely that you are hiring the "best-of-the-best" if the vast majority of your employees are men under the age of thirty who attended a very specific list of colleges.

Running a company is a team activity. I think there are too many sports metaphors in business, but if you've ever played a team sport you realize that the best teams are usually the ones with the players who play best together, not the ones with the most talented players. I could run this metaphor in to the ground, but the point is that hiring only the "best-of-the-best" is neither a credible claim nor a good methodology for creating a successful business. You might be able to do that when your company is 5 people, but it's probably much better to have good role players who are a cultural fit for your organization in the long run.

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