[entha_saava]

Yes, Joel Spolsky and IIRC Jeff Atwood have written somewhat extensively about it.

We are in a bubble, if we read programming blogs and think about programming in our free time, we are definitely not the kind that FizzBuzz exists to filter out. But from the perspective of companies, it makes sense if they really understood pointers or recursion or graph manipulation, because there are so many people lying on their resumes, not having sufficient analytical skills despite doing some resume driven cargo cult development etc.. And as an industry we don't really have an alternative to these algorithm interviews at scale, at the point we rely on non technical HR people to filter out resumes for us and they literally grep for framework/language experience.

[dogfoods]

Real jobs have certificates and degrees that mean something, where you can avoid the whole "do you know literal 101 things" phases of the interview process by just going "do you see the line on my resume that says M.Sc."