I think in a sense such standardization is always the price you have to pay for the popularization/mass adoption of anything. People have to find some sort of "

I think in a sense such standardization is always the price you have to pay for the popularization/mass adoption of anything. People have to find some sort of "established standards", some common grounds, as a compromise, as it becomes practically impossible/very hard to adopt a unique, custom-made solution to each applicant while still giving all of them the same fair chance and ensuring the quality of the results. The risks simply become great. It's similar to what happened to higher education: 400 years ago higher-ed diplomas were extremely rare and it were mostly people who really held on to something to study, something to look into, that did those stuffs, and the institution could adapt to their needs individually. However, now that a huge percentage of the population get higher-ed diplomas, there has to be a standardized procedure to stuffs like university admission, issuance of doctoral degrees, etc. What would you do if you were on the employer's side? Eventually people have to find a compromise and this is the solution that they came up with. Guess if I were on their side it would be hard for me to come up with something better and "safer". Also, it does suck to have to sit for exams which aren't necessarily directly related to the actual skills, but on the other hand I would say that that what I learned via SAT did indeed help my future studies, both in the university and by myself. I guess coding interviews can be perceived as something similar. There's no use complaining about the situation. One just has to face up to it and ace it, especially given how everybody else just has to go through the same. It's not something entirely ludicrous/Kafkasque after all. Also, to be able to thoroughly study for and prepare for something on one's own, this on itself probably illustrates a lot about this person's qualities already. Of course it would be theoretically nice to spend all this time and energy on something that is unique to every person, but that is not totally realistic and would be hard to evaluate. One can still do that with their side projects though.