This is an excellent way of putting it. Also please understand that as employers we make people do this silly dance because it's the best way we, and frankly a

This is an excellent way of putting it. Also please understand that as employers we make people do this silly dance because it's the best way we, and frankly anyone, knows to reduce the risk of hiring high quality candidates. I can understand the frustration of doing the silly dance for companies that don't pay competitively and think they are at the same level as Google minus the pay... but for companies paying among the top 5%, we get flooded and flooded with resumes and while you may be a good person, present yourself nicely (and those are all good things to do), and even impress with a resume, it's simply too risky to hire you on that basis without seeing a demonstration of your technical abilities. When I started out I really was dead-set against hiring people based on the silly dance... after making a lot of bad hires and seeing people who looked impressive on paper but couldn't apply some basic algorithmic knowledge to solve some problems I succumbed to using the silly dance and honestly the quality of candidates I hired improved substantially.