Not that extreme. Interviews are meant to ensure candidates aren't lying on their resumes, but nothing is done to ensure companies aren't lying too.

I'm pretty sure you can leave in the first weeks easily in most countries.

Sure, but then you've lost out on other offers that you may have declined, and you're back to unemployed.

Indeed. The labor market is quite illiquid from the point of the laborer, with a lot of ugly sunk costs and worse opportunity costs. There's not enough safety nets if you buy the wine-and-dine sales pitch but find the reality is a lot more of a lemon than you were sold. (There are no lemon laws for the labor market, sigh.)

It's happened to me twice now. I'm loving the ideas in this thread about asking the, "tell me about a time when ..." style questions because I've always delved deep into the culture and values philosophy, and have found that so far each company was describing their aspirational ideal, which did not reflect practice at all.

As an engineering manager I try to answer truthfully to these probing questions because (1) If someone quits after being hired under false pretenses it's more work for me, (2) I'm relatively new to the position so naive/earnest enough to speak the truth (I was a developer too!)

This seems like such common sense to me that I'm surprised it isn't more common. At this point I think most managers are just too disconnected and don't realize how it really feels. I guess most people will also put up with a lot of pain before they go back out to the job market. I know I do.

I guess this should be motivation to me to get back to work on one of my crappy ideas that could turn into a startup ;-)