It's not about selectivity in general. It's about companies not testing for relevant skills when they interview. Reciting the implementation of some obscure al

It's not about selectivity in general. It's about companies not testing for relevant skills when they interview. Reciting the implementation of some obscure algorithm from memory is entirely irrelevant to the daily job of a software engineer. Being able to do that does not make you a good software engineer, and most good software engineers cannot do that. They do these "programming trivia" style interviews because it makes them feel clever and superior to the interviewees, and because it's a lot less work for them than conducting an interview that actually probes what level of software engineering talent the candidate has.