Companies use college as a filter because it's difficult to assess proficiency during an interview and they'd like some way to cull the wheat from the chaff, an

Companies use college as a filter because it's difficult to assess proficiency during an interview and they'd like some way to cull the wheat from the chaff, and avoid wasting time talking to and hiring charlatans and posers. Meanwhile, if you ask google-style brain-teasers during interviews (which can have a legit purpose, but it's become a cliché), people complain about that. On the third hand, if you ask candidates do actual assess-able work during an interview, the extremes are "white board coding" and "take home programming problems", people balk at whatever you do for that too. None of these are necessarily good, nor necessarily better than the others. HN is lousy with complaints about all the different ways to filter and assess candidates.