I have interviewed people at several companies, but at one company I went through hundreds of resumes, probably over 100 phone screens, and dozens of interviews

I have interviewed people at several companies, but at one company I went through hundreds of resumes, probably over 100 phone screens, and dozens of interviews. I noticed some patterns. One was that every technical question after the third one was usually a waste. Anyone who hit it out of the park on the first three, hit almost all of the subsequent ones out of the park. No one who struggled through the first three would suddenly start doing well on the subsequent questions. Another thing I noticed is people fell into a Gaussian distribution. Some were on the left end of it, but most of those were weeded out by the recruiters, or by resumes or finally by phone screens. Just like a bell curve, most of the people were in the middle. Of the dozens I interviewed in person, only three were on the right end of the bell curve. Which is before you even get to soft skills. Your results speak for themselves. You have found an exercise that helps mark the top 10% from the 11-40% from the 41-100%. You might want to read some blog posts like Jeff Atwood's "Why can't programmers program?"