Or are software engineers, in average, getting more arrogant these days ? (_genuine_ question I've had for some time now)
The flood of unqualified candidates into the job pool has made the task of sifting through resumes and talking to potential candidates far more time consuming. The time requirement alone has made the old way of interviewing untenable.
The hoops are a way for companies to limit their time investment and reduce perceived risk. Unfortunately, it doesn't work. It alienates the very candidates they want to attract while doing nothing to deter the unqualified and it isn't any more reliable at telling us who's qualified than the old method was.
Now, I don't know for sure if that's hyperbole or not, but that's the impression I'm getting from talking to hiring managers.
I interviewed with google last month. I met like ~20 people who were also interviewing at google at the hotel breakfast. Some of them said they have been prepping for the interview everyday for past 4 months ( didn't help with my confidence :)).
Reception at google was filled with 100s of people waiting for their turn to be picked up. And this was just one building among of many, many buildings. Lady at the reception at Avis car rental told me that they get 100's of people coming everyday for interview at google. It was bizzare and surreal to experience 'interview industrial complex' first hand.
All they've managed to bring forth with their epic hiring process (now the de-facto gold standard, worldwide) is an epic... arms race. The higher they set their "bar", the more desperately people will cram their heads full of Boyer-Moore, A*, and countless other algorithms they (and their interviewers) couldn't otherwise begin to care about.
Other than Avis, Airbnb, and the local hotels, it's hard to imagine who could realistically benefit from such theater.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
Their main problem is that their hr specialist take a long time to train, and since stationed in good startups they might want to become a FullTime employee themselves, instead of switching to a new startup as the existing one grows too big.
If I can come up with a reliable, repeatable system for identifying good developers, I still have to convince other companies to pay for it. The skepticism I get from companies is off the charts.
Do you know how the "HR as a service" company gets around that? Maybe that's why they embed their employees in the startup (face time generates trust)? I don't see them lasting long, though, for the exact reason you state: they're setting themselves up for high training costs and high turnover.
Or maybe they're reacting to how little we can learn from a single interview by adding more hoops. Either way, it's a broken system. If anyone has a solution, I'll build it :)
Unfortunately, I don't see any companies going in that direction. Every company I've spoken to, from huge corporations to tiny startups, treat technical interviewing as an afterthought. Which can be funny and surreal in an Orwellian way, considering the big companies have very well defined systems for non-technical interviewing. So everything will be running like a swiss watch until it comes time to test your technical knowledge, then it's treated as one big unknowable wild card.
[0]: Or used to interview. They were bought out by the NCC Group and I have no idea how they go about things.
"folkloric and irrational" is far too accurate!
I would say this though that, 4 screens, hackerrank, take home coding, onsite format is not limited to big tech companies. I've had to do that for local smaller shops too.
Not the whole story of course, but might be a factor.