[jboggan]

I've come across them repeatedly and in some cases they have formed the majority of candidates that got to a phone screen. It's a result of our industry having many high paying jobs in relative physical comfort with no hard gatekeepers. Can you imagine what interviewing for a first year law associate's position at a BigLaw firm or a radiology residency would be like if there were no law and med schools and no board certifications?

Considering the rate of false positives in any software engineering interview process there is every incentive for the underqualified and unqualified to "fake it 'til they make it". It's also difficult to tell the difference between someone failing upwards and someone aggressively managing their career by switching positions with lateral raises in this hot job market, hence the need to distrust the skill of even senior developers and force this rigmarole on every level of engineering talent.