[ditonal]

Sure. In general, I am not against tough interviews. I just think that if you have elite hiring standards, you better be an elite company making elite offers. But you can't say "we only hire the best of the best!" and then comp negotiation rolls around and you say "well, this is market salary, but since we're a startup....".

I think some of these average companies should recognize themselves for what they are and be more accepting of average candidates. Give some new people in the industry a chance, train some entry-level people, especially if the work you're doing is not really cutting edge tech but just web apps or data analysis stuff that bright but not world-class people can learn with practice.

Also, companies should just focus more on candidate experience. I have interviewed and been rejected by Facebook a few years back. They did expect me to jump through hoops, but in general, they had a few original questions, I felt like they had a great candidate experience with polite recruiters, they put me up in a nice hotel and expensed it instantly, and I knew that if I did get through those hoops they were going to pay me a lot of money. I didn't get it, but I felt fine afterwards. I'm angry at all the average companies that don't do any of that but think they're entitled to put you through the same grinder. My only big criticism of companies like Facebook is they should give more feedback so you feel like you got something to improve upon. Also, I know Zuckerberg campaigns hard for H1Bs, but when Facebook is paying people what they're paying, I assume he genuinely does want to find the world's best and is not just trying to undercut labor. Although most H1Bs are in fact about undercutting labor, and the simple solution is to change it to an auction rather than a lottery and give them more time to look for new jobs before they have to leave. (note, I do not work for Facebook, I interviewed there once and got rejected but had a massively more positive experience with them than most companies. Google is also an excellent company to interview for, I'm sure there are some others but not many).