All the problems you bring up are real. Perhaps the hack-together approach could be rephrased as a screening stage, not a hiring stage. No point in blindly hiri

All the problems you bring up are real. Perhaps the hack-together approach could be rephrased as a screening stage, not a hiring stage. No point in blindly hiring people after testing them with some random, one-day stressful sessions. (It's like scoring students with exams; makes no sense at all, when an informal oral exam would really tell you how much the student knows. Scoring students while having a beer with them may not be conventional, yet my former PhD advisor used that as a pre-screen for hiring new grads.)