I think OP is expecting a level of competence from interviewers that simply doesn’t exist anymore. He’s from a time when the initial conversation would be engineers only and absolutely focused on past projects.
This actually makes the problem much worse because the only people who are acing these tests are people who are investing their time in acing these tests and not people who are actually good at their jobs. If you found a job there is little incentive to do any thing at work, and you are just better off continuing to practice interviewing further, so that you can quit to grab another 50% raise in 6 months.
Ironically these kind of people are considered to be in high demand. Most of them haven't done one single turn key project their whole lives, and wouldn't know or even stay to do one if needed. The real ones who have proven track records of delivering projects aren't even considered hiring because they don't know a dozen ways of inverting a tree.
The world is an unfair place, most companies with these hiring processes, have moats which are pretty much an infinite gravy train, so its ok to do all this. This is the game, We just have to deal with this as we go.
Just recently two of my friends switched their jobs. They may have spend maximum of 30 mins to prepare for their interviews in total. One is a manager and other is recruiter. Their interviews were quick and didn't take more than 3-4 hours each. Not only that they claim they enjoyed the interview process.
Our interviews are so grueling, we need to spend hours preparing for our interviews. We are treated like liars and need to proof that we are not lying. I don't know why we take this abuse and how we can fight it. It has been really frustrating for me lately.
I'm not trying to sound like a smartass. This is a real problem. I've been bitten before by candidates with big stories to tell about their past deliverables, but were a fountain of bugs once they were hired. Sometimes it's easy to tell, sometimes candidates background is a bit different than yours so you can't easily judge if them writing three customized discombobulators for flux capacitance use cases is something challenging or not. What is more, barely anyone writes alone. We almost all work in teams, and it's easy to claim N% of contribution to the code the team has written. In many cases you will be able to somewhat confidently speak about other people's code since you've been reading and reviewing it.
At AWS, however, it’s important to look at the well-roundedness of the candidate. It doesn’t matter how much code you’ve delivered if you’re an asshole in meetings.
Being a self-starter, earning the trust of your peers, and being highly-focused on customer experience are all soft skills, but are critical to ensuring success in the role. Hiring the wrong person is costly, and even then, many people at AWS wash-out in the first 2 years.
Soft skills and collaborative working habits are MORE important than writing code. Code can be taught. Being collaborative and thinking-like-an-owner is much harder to teach.
No. OP has not realized that the job market has plenty of charlatans who can talk well, but can't do the job.
There is plenty of evidence that this just isn't true.
Fortunately, that hasn’t always been the case, otherwise I wouldn’t be in the job I am today. But that does seem to be the exception rather than the rule.