As the interview was further and further analyzed by both The Company and the proletariat, an arms race developed. The Company asked esoteric questions and the proles studied. The proles learned to FizzBuzz and The Company developed FooBaz. Whiteboards gave way to take home interviews which gave way to probationary offers. Personal questions were supplanted by a form of subtextual sparring in which small facial movements, pauses, and hand movements spoke volumes.

By 2034 the majority of proles were on illegal performance-evaluation enhancing drugs, necessitated by the fact that the average prole was also on The Company's indefinite performance improvement probation. They occupied over 20% of their working hours proving their worth to The Company, which had hired Prefects to wander the endless halls. The Prefects started administering the Voight-Kampf employee aptitude tests on proles, but soon began testing each other on their own effectiveness in administering the test.

Before The Fall, the end state of the system was that The Company existed only to vet its own employees, all of whom were in charge of secretly monitoring other groups of employees. They had their nominal tasks such as programming or planning, but employee evaluation was based solely on the ability to evaluate others in their nominal tasks.