Why do companies boast of their “high hiring bar”? At this point, I start having double thoughts about the company as soon as I see that phrase. Maybe it’s me, but it sounds somehow.

I think it’s disgusting that short people get pushed out just because they can’t sit at it.

Something needs to be done.

Variable-height hiring bars to accommodate all sizes.

Yeah, it's a bit pretentious.

In some ways it should be a good thing - a heads up of "hey, expect a tough interview process, and expect to be working with some great, like-minded people if you pass." Thing is everyone thinks they have a tough interview process and great people working for them, when in reality there's always some... slackers and incompetent sods floating around anywhere (putting it politely.)

Not necessarily a bad thing. I mean, a high hiring bar with web devs would be to demand that they understand the basic idea behind HTML and CSS.

I don't get the issue apart from that it perhaps sounds a bit pretentious.

Doesn't it send a message that it's likely the people working there have gone through more than the bare minimum of testing?
might appeal to someone who is currently has low skilled colleagues.

Surely some fall through the cracks but it's not like a less rigorous hiring process would be better.

I guess the one downside is they might miss out on some really good people who don't feel like spending a lot of time interviewing. (which can be a big deal. If you've got multiple offers and one company demands a lot of interviews some might pick the other)

I assume it means a million interviews, trivia questions, and sucking a lot of dick. So I don't even bother with those.

The people who boast of the hight hiring bars are management and HR people. They tend to be more on the competitive side so are naturally more attracted to a competetive climate.

Teamplayers are more on the cooperative side and therefore value a cooperative climate more. So if you actually want to work in a team, avoid the ones having "high hiring bars".

But if you like boasting and competition and a more rough environment in general, you should prefer the ones advertising that way. Otherwise, you may end up in a company full of nerds without after-work parties and where meetings are infrequent, dry, on point and short.

These companies are also bad at estimating the total cost per hire that comes with such idiotic policies.

2 jobs ago I was a team lead at a unicorn that (internally) boasted about hiring only about 5% of candidates. Do you know how many stupid interviews I had to conduct every week? And how many promising candidates I lost because someone in a later round had to pull an alpha nerd to protect their own fragile ego?

Also, once you got in everything was about the same as in every other company I ever worked at. Pretty much every single new hire was very disappointed once they realized this, they wrongly assumed that the high hiring bar had any practical consequences.

@Fast-Nop Woah dude, "understanding the basic ideas behind HTML and CSS" is a bit extreme...

@PonySlaystation Actually not. Just look at the garbage that is CSS frameworks, made by and for people who fail to understand exactly that.

It was bad enough with presentational markup in the 1990s, but we didn't have CSS. These days, there is no excuse besides total incompetence to stick to the bad methodologies of 1990s HTML 3.

@PonySlaystation There's no real difference between 1990s:

<center><font size="2" color="red">Example</font></center>

and contemporary:

<div class="text-center font-l text-red-400">Example</div>

It bloats up the markup, making it easily five times larger than necessary, the bloat is not cached across sub-pages, you can't easily redesign it, and it's not maintainable.

Using semantic markup (as HTML has always been meant), CSS and proper selector chains instead of slapping classes on every div (and ditching pointless divs altogether), is the way better and intended alternative.