911 engineers rate two decades of technical interviews, and topic relevance isn't the problem.

This paper reconstructs how the software engineering community remembers technical hiring across four eras from 2005 to 2026, with retrospective ratings from 911 respondents showing steadily expanding interview work and burden (arXiv 2609.14046). Analysis of public prep questions finds most tested knowledge has a plausible use in an ordinary project, so relevant topics form an invalid process when accumulated beyond the vacancy, presented under artificial constraints, or interpreted without a common job-derived standard. The proposed framework derives a bounded assessment from declared responsibilities and near-term tickets, preserves normal tools, defines three evidence gates, and stops when the decision is supported.