[gaius]

on one end, there's a "developers" shortage, but on the other, all companies are funneling potentially good engineers through processes designed for the "interview" experts.

If there genuinely was a shortage could any company get away with these ridiculous practices? It only makes sense if there is both a glut of candidates and of existing employees with lots of free time on their hands.

During the dotcom boom when there was a genuine shortage an interview was a phone screen, a couple of hours onsite then “when can you start?”. Companies couldn’t shovel workers in the door fast enough!

[clarry]

The big companies that do this have no shortage. They can afford to be as picky as they want and people are still drooling for a job at these places.

There's still genuine shortage around, but it's by no means universal. Smaller companies are affected more, but they can't afford to shovel workers in like the big companies once could. And it's pretty likely that they are the ones that get hurt the most if they get a bad hire, so they are in a dire situation. The likes of google, facebook and amazon can easily soak up a bunch of bad hires until they realize the problem and show them the door.

[gaius]

Plenty of smaller companies cargo-cult those kinds of practices, and the matter wasn't helped by hyperbole from the likes of Spolskey saying one bad hire can destroy your company (while noone wondered why the top developers in the world would be flocking to work on his dumb project management tool). No other industry makes such a song-and-dance of hiring as tech, insists that people do the job as a hobby in their spare time too, etc etc