Someone here pointed it out on another post a long time ago but the only explanation for the hazing ritual that has become modern hiring is that we have a glut of engineering talent.
I'm interested to see what the new trend of remote work will do to the current paradigm. I think the lot of us are about to find we're not much more than highly skilled mechanics.
Edit:
On reading all the comments that came after mine, I realize I'll have a decision to make Q1 2021 when my role at my current startup becomes financially unwise to maintain (slow growth on a popular product in a very niche industry). Im a co-founder but still it will make more financial sense to put the tech product in Maintenance Mode for awhile with some offshore contractors. All the hard work has been done save for riding out the slow Change The Industry adoption curve.
When this day comes I'll be back on the market myself and in considering all this I think Im going to target large F500 companies who's core business isn't tech or internet or whatever. Companies that rely on tech as a part of their larger non-tech business.
I know folks who are devs at AMZN and GOOG and I can't help but come away with the impression that save for the RSUs they wouldn't be there either. The pain around getting the offer may not be the worst part - the worst part may be after you accept and actually have to work there. Fairly simple logic might indicate that if the dating phase is this bad, the marriage can't be much better.
More specifically than just a glut of engineering talent, is an incredibly broad range of engineering talent. I'm not talking about genius 10x engineer controversy or anything like that.
I'm talking about the difference between someone transitioning fields fresh out of a 12 week boot camp and someone with a computer science degree, full stack experience, and knowledge of what's going on under the hood. Even when you see many years of experience on somebody's resume, it's really really hard to tell what that means.
It's the combination of a really wide range of skill and a really big difficulty assessing that skill from just the resume. So the interview really has to do heavy lifting in this field.
Compare that to my partners field, where there's a licensing board, the job duties are pretty much the same anywhere, and all you really need is quick check of is this person sane, is their license and training up-to-date, and do their references check out. Even in that field, you can imagine the interviews being way more extensive if there wasn't a license requirement and mandatory regular training. It would be like a lawyer having to pass the bar exam at every interview, instead of being able to say that they've passed the bar exam.
(This is all coming from somebody without a CS degree who transitioned into the field, so I'm really really not proposing we do gatekeeping. I'm just acknowledging that without gatekeeping, we effectively have to pass the bar exam at every interview.)
If you know what skills you are looking for (hint: lots of companies and recruiters don't), this is not actually that hard.
For every skill, there are questions that should be really easy to answer for everybody with expertise, but are suprising/hard to answer for everybody who pretends to have knowledge. This enables you to check quite quickly whether the claimed skills are actually there or not.
For example, the easier sections in
> https://github.com/satwikkansal/wtfpython
might give you a hint for topics that most seasoned Python programmers should know blindfolded while they are probably rather surprising for anybody with shallow Python knowledge. Let the applicant explain how they came up with their solution for, say, some of the problems, and you will see rather fast whether the claimed skills are actually there or not.