From the comments:

> The worst part is, half the people you interview with would not pass their own bar nowadays.

Any time I saw a co-worker pull this, I would call them out on it and embarrass them in front of people for it. I found it completely unacceptable to ask ridiculous questions that were irrelevant to the job, that they didn’t even know the answer to.

We were hiring entry level sys admins, who would reboot a server if an alert went off. They needed some familiarity with Linux… login, navigate around a little. A candidate had Linux on his resume, and my co-worker starts asking what his favorite feature of the last kernel release was. No one applying for the position is watching Linux kernel releases and reading the notes, nor was I (and still don’t). They can still do the job perfectly well. When I pressed him on it, he couldn’t answer the question either. He just mumbled some nonsense.

I'm curious as to how many people are applying to the job and how many get called up. If you get 2000 applications and 50 of them seem very capable of doing the job, then this kind of pickyness is what you end up with. It's just the logical end of there being a metric shit-tonne of people who want a job and not enough work to go around.

I'm also curious if they then even opt to hire anyone, since it wouldn't surprise me if the whole thing is just an elaborate sham to not hire someone, since their requirements are so high no-one is going to achieve them, so then they have the excuse they need to not hire someone.