Auditioning is, so I’m told, the bane of every aspiring actor’s career. Auditions, and the common rejections that follow, are time consuming, they make a person vulnerable, and they often seem somewhat arbitrary—at least if I believe half of what pop culture tells me about it (I’ve never done an audition, even for a high school play, so I’m really speaking out of inexperience here).

But some actors don’t audition. Or they do so rarely.

Do you think Tom Cruise auditions any more? I doubt it. His last (non-sequel) motion picture acting role was in 2018’s American Made. Do you think director Doug Liman needed Cruise to audition for the leading role?

I really doubt it.

Why not?

Because Cruise has a huge body of work available, covering more than four decades. And as a director, even if you’ve never seen a Tom Cruise film, you can easily watch 5 today (time permitting) on Netflix, to get a sense for what his acting skills are like.

Asking Cruise to do an audition is a likely way to not get him to do your film. I’m sure he has better things to do than to re-prove to you that he can act. Unless, maybe, it’s for a role very atypical for the actor, as explained on Quora.

So why do so many tech companies demand that developers do coding challenges to prove they can code, even if they have years worth of public GitHub contributions that prove they can code?