But that's not a compelling argument against doing coding assessments in interviews, I could see it as an argument in favor of also having behavioral questions.
>it's such a bizarre idea that programmers are uniquely incompetent among all professions in the world.
There's no standardized licensing for our profession. The closest thing we have really is Computer Science degrees which, as the article this thread is about points out, doesn't churn out job ready programmers unless they're also doing independent study.
Evaluating on past performance alone would be impossible. What if this is to be their first job? What if their previous job won't tell you anything other than "Yes this person worked here" because they're scared of getting sued?
If you're relying on a candidate's self description of their past performance you've just switched out selecting for people who can perform under pressure to selecting for people who are good at bullshitting/charming.
To become a lawyer, you have to sit for a very intense and stressful exam that you took two extra years of schooling for. There are similar processes in place for becoming a doctor, after even more schooling and forced on the job training.
Some form of assessing coding skills is going to happen just like some form of skill assessment happens with any knowledge worker job. It'll just either happen during interviews or eventually through some kind of certification process.
The example you gave of professional sports is odd to me- Yes, they have to deal with it when they make bad hiring choices just like most organizations do but they still clearly feel that it's worth the effort to be very selective in their hiring process.
There is an opportunity cost to "giving someone a chance" - even if you moved to a very permissive system where it's easy in, easy out people still have to onboard that employee and go through the process of firing them. If a simple coding assessment had revealed they can't even complete very basic tasks it would avoid taking up company resources.
This isn't a defense of forcing someone to write perfect code on a whiteboard, I just think it's absolutely valid to ask someone to write code in an interview setting.