Comedian Daniel Tosh had a bit about people that claimed to be smart, it's just that they were just bad at taking tests. He said, "oh, so you struggle with the part where we find out what you actually know?"

I hear a lot of complaints about the "typical" software engineering hiring process, and it usually comes from the people that don't do well within the current system. Could the process be improved? Almost certainly, I don't think that anyone thinks that this is an absolutely perfect way to hire people. But it is an undeniable fact that some people pass this interview process; software companies do fill positions with this process.

So that kind of makes me think that many of the complaints are from people that wouldn't cut it at a high-pressure tech company and would be better off coding internal software for a non-tech corporation. I'm sure that the hiring process at Kroger (the grocery store) is much lower pressure than Google's. Google might not need you to code some efficient algorithm to search a b-tree every day, but they pay top dollar and can rightly expect that their software engineers can come up with efficient and creative solutions to hard problems without dragging the rest of their team down.