You benefit right now, in countless ways, from past versions of those exact same people you are so tired of hearing. Awesome gratitude, and way to pay it forward.
I've interviewed at Microsoft when they asked me how to find the fake coin based on N number of weighings. I've gone to Silicon Valley Brass Ring job fairs during the Dotcom Boom where they interviewed onsite and I was asked to code on the spot. During that era, various companies asked me things like what the largest number was for a 2^64 number or what the current Linux kernel version was, or what the default TCP timeout was.
And since Google came on the scene with their focus on algos, the entire industry has changed again. Every year the interview process in Silicon Valley has gotten harder and harder. That's the reality. Crying about it won't change it.
If I had the power to change it, I would hire fast and fire fast, like Netflix. But that comes with its own problems as well, so there is no best solution. All you can do is adapt and change with the industry. I know I'm not smart or ambitious enough to ever make it to the highest echelons of a company to affect culture so I'm happy getting paid as much as I can until I retire.
Some of my former co-workers are STILL stuck in the same company 16 years later. I still have lunch with them at least once a year, and they are petrified to change companies even though this current company keeps laying people off and replacing them with offshore workers. They don't have the guts to buckle down and study and adapt, so they're waiting to get laid off, which is sad to me.
There is a correlation between these horrendous interviews and quality of candidates otherwise, if they were full of false positives, we would stop doing them.
The problem is they produce false negatives and how do we go about fixing that? Is it even that big of a problem? These are all debatable. We haven't hit the point where hiring is SO expensive that we can't handle false negatives, we may in the future, then we'd work much harder at addressing the current situation.
Or the alternate explanation. Hiring is incredibly difficult, everyone is bad at it, and the best solution people can come up with is to cargo cult Google's hiring process.
From experience I know there are many companies that have absolutely no evidence to support their hiring process, they just do it because it's the current fad.
And I assure you whiteboard interviews are full of plenty of false positives. Particularly now that people are spending so much time prepping for the interviews. You know the saying about metrics ceasing to he useful
In other industries people just don't talk about spending 6-8 hours a week every week interviewing applicants--not even in high-turnover industries. That's an incredible cost, but it's not counted as a line item, just yet another annoyance of the annoying hiring process.
My claim is it's not expensive enough yet for decision makers to actively explore alternatives. Will it get there as supply of quality engineers decrease? Maybe. Probably.
In my experience the companies I worked at tracked it very well, and we knew exactly how many hours were spent on hiring related work and how much it was costing us. We still used the current industry standard whiteboard, full day approach.
I think the perception of a lack of quality engineers in the market is just a symptom of the problem: the expense in time and annoyance of changing jobs and the risk (or experience) of becoming a false negative reduces job mobility and heavily slants the resume stack towards the true negatives rather than the experienced people who would be more actively looking around in a saner market.
I haven't heard of a better explanation for the notion, seemingly unique to software, that so many people floating around the industry are so abysmally unqualified to work at another company in the same industry. There are historical factors, but they don't seem adequate to explain this perceived fraud problem.