I think it speaks to the real point of hazing whiteboard trivia and time-waster takehomes: political gatekeeping. Engineers in many companies are already given

I think it speaks to the real point of hazing whiteboard trivia and time-waster takehomes: political gatekeeping. Engineers in many companies are already given far worse job experience than what is paradoxically required on their resume to get in. Interesting or valuable projects are rare and lots of people fight over them. Whiteboard hazing tests for fealty or naivety that will let existing engineers remain superior to you a lot of the time. Really smart people who would leapfrog you aren’t going to agree to be infantilized like that. So it’s a filter on a certain combination of both competence and fealty. The company / department as a whole might have an incentive to hire really good people, but because lower level managers and engineers own the loose rubric of what counts as a good candidate performance, their incentives to hire only a subset of competent people who are also manipulated into being in their control will take precedence. It’s so bad that we even have things like TripleByte now that are outsourcing options for filtering based on fealty while disingenuously claiming to be objectively filtering on skill assessment.