It seems to me that there's a high-end piece of the market where none of this applies. If you're really good, you can go your whole career without ever having

It seems to me that there's a high-end piece of the market where none of this applies. If you're really good, you can go your whole career without ever having to throw your resume over the wall and wade through this sort of filtering process. And if you have an experienced team who have worked with lots of good devs in the past, you can reach out directly to them and go straight to the hiring part of the interview. It's only where those two ends have to interface with the rest of the hiring universe that you see friction like the author describes. If you're the guy who built Big Thing X and some random company tries to get you to spend 3 hours on their coding test, you're going to say no and they're never going to find anybody half as good as you. And if you're a team of Good Devs at a Genuinely Good Shop trying to hire with a job ad, you're going to get a thousand applicants who can't FizzBuzz and you'll develop scars in the form of coding tests. I think the key as a developer is to rapidly get one's self into that category where you don't need to deal with this crap. The last time anybody dared hand me a coding test was a good fifteen years ago, and that was the last they ever heard from me. I bet I'm nowhere near alone in that department.