[ben_jones]

Personally I'm very defensive against more academic interview processes (like Google's) because I'm a college drop-out and feel some amount of insecurity being ranked among peers with better academic backgrounds who might excel at such tests. In truth it is a personal failure of mine, and something i'll eventually get over through study/training the next time I'm looking for a job (hopefully years from now).

Sure it would be great if we found some super-magical process that didn't irritate or inconvenience incumbent and new developers alike. But you probably can't please everyone, and in the meantime we need to do the best we can because hiring still has to happen. Companies with slightly better processes will be rewarded (hopefully) and companies with more painful processes will face some penalty from losing candidates that would move their company forward. Hopefully this is enough of an incentive to keep companies continually working towards better hiring practices. But I kind of doubt it.

[dominotw]

I can tell you from experience ppl with college degrees go through the exact preparation process, aren't well off because they took an algorithm course 2 decades ago.

[ben_jones]

I agree. But I think there is a skillset to taking tests that can become highly developed in a college environment (where 3/4 finals exams are taken quarterly). You're more likely to get a fully grounded education, such as database and operating systems semantics (compared to the self-taught web developer who began and exists at a much higher abstraction level). It's my understanding sometimes these questions are sometimes thrown in and could be crucial to a candidates success.

Of course this applies more to fresh grads.