[yamtaddle]

> I need hackers and now the market's flooded with very academically strong, much smarter than me and easily more talented PMCs.

> so now we may resort to paid novel take homes e.g. write a simple device driver from scratch for the Intel E1000 in C99 over the weekend

There are too many good candidates so you're having to... flog them harder?

God, tech hiring is weird. People in other sectors of the economy look at me like I've just announced that I have cancer, when I explain what the tech interview world looks like.

[tcmart14]

Yup. My wife finds it extremely odd that my interviews go more rounds and more hours for a job to write a simple CRUD app than for her interviewing for an ICU job as an RN.

[yamtaddle]

Oh well you see writing a CRUD app is so much more important and serious and difficult than saving human lives. And bad programmer hires are uniquely damaging in a way that bad hires aren't in any industry with normal interview processes (which is nearly all of them) and there's just no way to mitigate those effects until they're nearly gone by applying common-sense best-practices to your processes, that you ought to be doing anyway. Nope, only solution's to put every candidate through the wringer, at enormous time & monetary expense to all concerned!

Programmers catch a lot of shit for being immature or unprofessional, but I think tech management deserves a harder look, when it comes to those things.

[intelVISA]

Medicine and adjacent has pretty well-defined schooling pathways, afaik a nurse cannot claim to have picked up their skills 'extracurricularly' in the same manner that a future 10x SWE can - as a result we have a diverse pool that contains both CS grads from top schools who may be unsuitable, (plenty of incredible ones too, of course), alongside random 'uneducated' hackers who may be a good fit.

Thus, in lieu of a standardized framework we have to invent our own.

I very much agree though, the avg. CRUD shop could probably just ask Fizzbuzz and have the same outcome as these gauntlets.

[yamtaddle]

> Thus, in lieu of a standardized framework we have to invent our own.

The FAANGs and similar could easily have created such a thing, and driven wide adoption of it. They find some other value in their very-expensive process, or they'd have gotten rid of it with the snap of their fingers, if that were the only reason.

I suspect it's mainly to do with reducing turnover and, therefore, suppressing wages among their workers. Yes, despite those wages already being quite high. Wouldn't be the first time they've done it. "Solving" the problem would be trivial and relatively cheap, compared to the current processes, but it'd come at the cost of making it easier for employees to jump ship for more $$$, and none of them want that.

Why do the rest do it? Cargo-culting, mostly.

[FooBarBizBazz]

Also the typical hazing dynamics common to all cults.

[tcmart14]

For sure, its a management problem. I feel pretty confident, as just another engineer, I could sit down and shoot the wind about programming with someone for 30-45 minutes and know if they are worth their salt. No crazy assessments, no multiple rounds, just a conversation about the software industry and the process and tech.