hiring
Explanation
The Joke
A job candidate at an interview is told that the company has "normal hiring procedures" -- they ask puzzles and judge how well you solve them. When the candidate questions this, the interviewer admits that other companies use the same bizarre hiring protocols, and that engineers have studied the effectiveness of such processes and found that "your company use exactly the same" approach, implying the whole industry follows the same questionable practices. The candidate pleads, "Please don't scare me."
The comic satirizes the tech industry's notoriously strange interview practices, particularly the use of brainteaser puzzles and whiteboard coding challenges that often bear little resemblance to actual job duties. The joke is that when confronted about whether these methods actually work, the interviewer's defense is simply that everyone else does it too -- a classic appeal to convention rather than evidence.
The Humor
The humor comes from the candidate's growing horror at learning that the entire industry shares the same irrational hiring approach. Rather than being reassured that there is a better system somewhere, the candidate realizes the dysfunction is universal. The final panel's "Please don't scare me" captures the existential dread of job seekers who recognize the absurdity of the process but have no alternative. It resonates with anyone who has endured software engineering interviews where you are asked to invert a binary tree on a whiteboard for a job that involves writing database queries.