> the group that's unwilling to put up with this is unqualified
Companies that get a lot of applicants care more about false positives than false negatives. So they're fine not hiring a lot of qualified people, as long as there's a low chance of accidentally hiring an unqualified person. Apparently LeetCode-style problems work for that type of screening.
companies can win by hiring exceptional people with deep experience. the cost of not hiring these people has been unquantified. i would never want to be in their position. imagine a startup hires that one person who will make a billion dollar difference?
The startup isn't likely to be getting resumes on the scale that the big tech companies do and can afford to spend the time to look at each resume and maybe even do an interview with each candidate.
However, if you are getting resumes on the scale that the larger, well known tech companies do, then the individual attention cannot be paid on each resume. At that point, one looks more at a quick filter to try to remove the risky hires.
If you've got 1000 resumes and 80% of them are bad hires, and after an online assessment that takes it down to 200 resumes of which only 50% would prove to be bad hires, that is a significantly improved pool to consider.
Yes, it is possible that a great candidate was removed in that filter, but its also possible that one still remains in that pool.
Startups may be cargo cutting big tech interview processes, but the process has value for big tech companies and any others that have more resumes than they can reasonably deal with.
cost of living is driven by FAANG and startups use the same leetcode hiring process as FAANG, but pay less. the equity you get has a miniscule chance of becoming valuable.
Companies that get a lot of applicants care more about false positives than false negatives. So they're fine not hiring a lot of qualified people, as long as there's a low chance of accidentally hiring an unqualified person. Apparently LeetCode-style problems work for that type of screening.