[rafiki6]

As much as I love a good conspiracy theory, and yours is pretty damn good because this industry has colluded to keep wages down, I'm hard pressed to believe that this is the case. Interviewing is hard. Startups are led to believe they need to have a higher rate of false negatives over false positives to ensure they don't get a "bad hire". Most people in this industry just follow the trend they see. It's all they know. They have never seen another successful hiring strategy. So it persists.

[soft_shortcut]

My theory was pure imagination :) I 100% agree with what you said. The primary goal is to raise the bar of entry. The problem is, current SWE evaluations focus too much on one single task. The ration "writing functions" versus the rest might be about 20% vs 80%. We focus too much on the 20%. How about team work, collaboration, knowledge transfer, project related issues, mentoring people, setting up environments, understanding users, collaborating with product managers and designers, etc.

If you think about it, it's a pretty risky process for companies. Judging a candidate based on a few 45-min whiteboard exercises and a high level system design question, we're looking at only 20% of the whole picture.