[eckesicle]

There's not really a seniority level where this happens.

The outrage around the technical interviews shows a lack of understanding for the situation companies face when hiring.

The reality is that something closer to 99% of the pool are applying for jobs they're not qualified for (not the same as saying 99% of developers aren't qualified - there's extreme survivorship bias in the pool).

At company X we would hire ~1/400 applicants who applied, and about ~1/20 referrals. At a smaller company I worked for we hired perhaps 1/200.

The thing is, many of these applicants have five to ten years experience (some at FAANG), but can't code at all. It's simply not possible to trust anything on a CV without verifying it. How do you verify this at scale? A pair programming exercise.

Now the training of most interviewers is often poor, but it's far better to go down this route than the HN alternative: hiring without technical screening.