From (non-technical) management's perspective it isn't that cheap, though. It's more features still not getting delivered. It's less velocity. It's only seen a

From (non-technical) management's perspective it isn't that cheap, though. It's more features still not getting delivered. It's less velocity. It's only seen as cheaper than a bad hire because technical management already has a big say in setting the hiring bar. If you had corporate management who didn't listen to engineering and didn't think they needed to, who view it as replacable cogs, you wouldn't get away with that hiring bar. (And indeed, non-tech-driven companies tend to have more "traditional" engineer hiring processes.) Sometimes they may look similar, but there's a big difference here between processes that filter down a big mass of seen-as-interchangable-pieces to one hire and ones that often result in no hire.