[mgoblu3]

I feel this perspective gets lost a bit. Big companies don't roll through 1000 applications with 50 open spots and try to hire the best 50 candidates. They want to find maybe people in the top quartile of that, while spending the minimal amount of time on costs to find the adequate fits, and the cost of a false positive is way higher than the cost of a false negative.

Is the process great? Absolutely not, and I'm sure that these places miss out on qualified candidates because of the process and hire some people who gamed the process. Things like degrees and LeetCode tests and other screening methods are just ways to reduce cost and risk to get that "good enough" threshold.

[rightbyte]

It is no self evident fact that false negatives are less costly than false positives.

Understaffed projects might lead to failures, people quitting, expensive consultant aid etc.

Hireing a bad programmer and two good and ending up giving the poor one easy tasks or letting him go might be cheaper than hireing two good more slowly.

In general I feel the recruitement process is so random anyway that employers should just get it done and pick someone after throwing darts at a billboard with resumés for picking some to interview.