It's only going to get worse. As automation continues, jobs are going to be less about "being efficient and useful to society" and more about "proving other humans that you deserve to get money". And interviews are one manifestation of the latter.
I think SWE as a profession is in a little bit of denial, because we honestly (want to) believe we are being efficient. But the reality probably is that most SW companies don't do very useful work, but rather, struggling to make ends meet, are fighting tooth and nail to prove (often through deception and introducing complexity) that somebody needs their software. And this of course in turn affects the workers in these companies.
So SWEs will have to admit (mostly like everybody else) that it is actually a game of musical chairs, and if they don't want this game to happen in this fashion, they will have to institute some other way to play this game (of proving that you are useful), for example, by having a profession association and a profession exam.
Think about it. If there would really be that much work to be done in SWE, the companies would just take everybody. But they don't, they are more and more picky. There have been other articles linked from HN (such as http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/education/the-stem-crisis-i...) that say the same thing.
I don't think it's reasonable to suggest they'd just take everyone if the need is so great. Culture matters and if you get the wrong type of personalities in you could jeopardize your team and end up losing the, for lack of a better term, better bunch of the group.
I think it boils down to money, which are a manifestation of demand (and thus existence of jobs). If you have money to spent, you can afford to take risks (take people in and then throw them away if they turn out to be bad), you can afford to train people on the job, you can afford to organize the work better (as a canonical example, look at Facebook Haxl - by building domain-specific languages that are easy to use to non-CompSci people, which they are then interpreted on a platform written by a comparatively small group of CompSci people).
Here in Prague, situation is a little different to US (from my reading). SWEs are locally in quite high demand, as we are on the other side of the globalization. So companies often take almost anybody (for a reasonably paid job).
On the other hand, if the demand is stagnant, you will try to get the best people by being very picky in attempt to lower the costs.
I have seen E1, E2, SE and PE used as abbreviations for level of experience (Graduate Level 1, Graduate Level 2, Senior, Principal). These levels might have been applied to a RE (Reliability Engineer), SE (Safety Engineer), EE (Electrical Engineer) etc
So there is already potential confusion in the abbreviations used for various engineering roles. SWE provides some disambiguation. Interestingly HWE seems to be used for Hardware Engineer - when they are generally Electrical Engineers.
I think SWE as a profession is in a little bit of denial, because we honestly (want to) believe we are being efficient. But the reality probably is that most SW companies don't do very useful work, but rather, struggling to make ends meet, are fighting tooth and nail to prove (often through deception and introducing complexity) that somebody needs their software. And this of course in turn affects the workers in these companies.
So SWEs will have to admit (mostly like everybody else) that it is actually a game of musical chairs, and if they don't want this game to happen in this fashion, they will have to institute some other way to play this game (of proving that you are useful), for example, by having a profession association and a profession exam.
Think about it. If there would really be that much work to be done in SWE, the companies would just take everybody. But they don't, they are more and more picky. There have been other articles linked from HN (such as http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/education/the-stem-crisis-i...) that say the same thing.