I was looking for a job last year and interviewed at multiple places (https://matt.sh/searching-2013 https://matt.sh/searching-2013), so I think I have a recent

I was looking for a job last year and interviewed at multiple places (https://matt.sh/searching-2013 https://matt.sh/searching-2013), so I think I have a recent multi-employer perspective here. The biggest flaw in the entire current "standard accepted interview procedure" (read: cargo cult hiring process) is: they don't care about the interviewee's time. The secondary flaw is: the tech people designing interviewing processes don't understand the nature of "work," "thought," or what makes valuable employees, well, valuable. Companies enjoy using coding tests (sometimes lengthy) as a simple filter, but they don't really care about it. Every company I did a "coding test" for accepted me for an interview, but at no point did any of them ever mention or talk about my submission. I could have plagiarized every submission whole from some random site online. They'd never find out since they never asked me to talk through the work. One company, after 10 hours of my working on their exercise, even told me "sorry, we sent you the wrong one. do this other one instead." If you ask companies why they have their interview processes set up the way they do, they'll probably just say "because that's how company Y does it too." They want to be part of a successful pattern without understanding the underlying meaning. It's like a sales person using a dozen buzzword acronyms without understanding how anything fits together. But, if they do want to continue handing out 10 hour coding tests, society has a generally accepted way of handling issues like this: pay for time. If there is a power imbalance (employer vs. interviewee), the more powerful party should refrain from exploiting the weaker party without compensation. If coding tests really get annoying during your search, just launch a startup to destroy all the companies with bad hiring practices. No fury like an interviewee scorned.