Oh, man, you are so right! Some of the hiring practices in software drive me nuts! I remember back in 1978. I was a newly minted Master's in Computer Science. I applied to CBS for a job programming APL. They asked, "do you know APL?" I answered. "Yes, I taught it in Non-numerical Programming". The next day they called back "Do you know APL-SV?" I answered. "I don't think I am a good fit for this job". To this day, I have turned down similar attempts to match past skills, or I don't even bother to apply.

When I interview people I don't ask about what tools they work with - I try to find out how well they think. And not by asking tricky logic questions either. In the early 1980s my interview methodology was basically "Uh-huh, thank you. Nice resume. Do you know what a bubble sort is? [Answer: yes/no, it doesn't matter] Me: Here is the definition of a bubble sort. Now code it. I don't care: C/Fortran/Lisp/assembly/pseudocode/whatever. I'll see you in a half-hour." I ended up hiring a young Black lady, Eve Jones. Like everybody else, she was left to work out the code in the main meeting room, which had a wall of books supplied by the Chief Technical Officer of our small firm. Said CTO had left Bell Labs to start up this firm. Eve was the only - the only - person out of two dozen or so interviewees who, when I came back, had pulled the Algorithms text out of the bookcase and was checking her work. She looked guilty, as if she felt she was cheating or something. I was impressed. I hired her on the spot. Thinking for yourself does not mean you build everything from scratch necessarily, although she wrote her own code in this case. But she was smart enough to look it up. Best hire I had ever made in my whole life!