This part definitely rings true to me:
"We have very little idea about what makes good code, so it should come as no surprise that we have little-to-no idea how to find people who are good at coding, along with the dozens of complementary skills."
I don't think you can judge a company just by the questions they ask in interviews. Judging a company by the way the <i>interviewers</i> interact with you is perfectly valid, but I wouldn't treat the questions they ask as indicative of anything more than how bad they are at interviewing.<p>Company's generally suck at interviewing. It isn't what most/many of the interviewers were hired to do and it isn't their core competency. You don't want them to judge you based how good <i>you</i> are at things that have little to do with programming. Conversely, you should cut the interviewer some slack on things thing that have little to do with what <i>they</i> do every day.<p>You and your interviewer have agreed to meet for a date at what turns out to be a bad restaurant. Make the best of it and look past the food.<p>Google had an admittedly poor interview process* (the puzzles turned out to be useless at predicting anything) yet Google is generally considered a perfectly nice place to work.<p>* They found that interviews poorly predicted performance of the candidate.