Your last bullet is a good point. When you gain experience and responsibility as a software developer and take on broader roles, the main values you've accumul

Your last bullet is a good point. When you gain experience and responsibility as a software developer and take on broader roles, the main values you've accumulated are higher level skills, like the ability to bring a project to completion (and everything that entails). There's always a place for algorithmic hacking. But it feels like the easiest thing to hire for when you need it because it's so concrete. That's prob why it's so dominant in hiring practices: it's the only easy thing to measure.