I recommended an engineer once who I thought was great - he was a total "get shit done" kind of guy. But he did poorly in the interviews (I won't say they were leetcode-type problems, but you did have to have some algorithmic skills - I warned him beforehand to brush up on some of those types of programs.) As much as I liked the working with the guy, we couldn't hire him because he was a pretty solid "no" from the other interviewers.

I've never worked in a company that hired people based on the referral of one person, and honestly that sounds like a pretty f'd up company.

It doesn't matter what the person hired thinks. The important part is whether those making hiring decisions are hiring people with "stellar reputation".

In your case, "everyone knows he can't code", so he doesn't have stellar reputation. If we apply this scenario to what the GP said, no company would have hired a person where "everyone knows he can't code".

You said "He got hired because he was friends with our engineering manager." That's nepotism.

GP says hire somebody with stellar reputation. That's a totally different situation.

Well thats how it works everywhere. You have to suck up and pretent to be 'friends' with person with the power to get promoted too.

I haven't hired anyone recently but btwn 10-20 years ago I did hire a lot. Of course we reached out via our network of connections but that gets tapped out fast, so you have to rely on job postings. It was always hundreds of applicants per opening. Back then it wasn't 1000's but it might as well have been because I didn't have enough time to sift through them all. That's ok, you can just approach it like "the dowry problem" (also known as the secretary problem [1]).

But the job market and hiring is way worse now, and it's pretty horrible for job seekers atm.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem