My own opinion is let’s ignore companies that make us jump through hoops, as it only encourages them to become increasingly ridiculous.

Unfortunately not everyone is in a position to do that.. "beggars can't be choosers"

I’m of the opinion that if you are a company having trouble hiring people (everyone other than google/amazon) you should not copy their interview process.

There are great developers out there that do not do well in these interview environments, who are not worse than those who do well in them.

If you are going for a high power attorney partner job at a big firm they do not ask you to recite obscure case law. Id you are a master carpenter they do not ask you to build a cabinet using a hand lathe.

IMO provable previous work experience if a candidate has it should trump conceptual knowledge spewing, and interviews that ignore experience and give the same theoretical knowledge quiz as they do a new grad are shooting themselves in the foot. And I think everyone knows it, but most engineering orgs are terrified of letting a bad hire through so they blindly do whatever the “top” companies do.

Yup, that seems to be it.

As if there's some "secret sauce" to interviewing that all the other shops know except their own.

But the bigger point is that - even assuming for the sake of argument that these questions actually do "work", on some leel - they've become such a huge fad that people are just adopting them solely on the basis of authority, without intrinsically understanding why these questions work, or more importantly, how to interpret candidates' responses to them

In other words, they're just following a script. I wouldn't say quite it's on "blind faith", per se (because the companies do have some reputation). But it's not much better than blind faith. Such that this precious quote of yours, from just a few days ago, seems quite apt here:

This practice of blindly adopting ideas just because they work for Google needs to stop.

So I guess the problem with objective-seeming (and often just simply gratuitously hard) "filter" questions like those suggested here is that their real purpose seems to be give the process an appearance of objectivity - "We had a guy in here, his code samples looked great, and he talked a great game and all -- but would ya believe, he totally froze on that Lego robot puzzle question! What a poser!" -- when of course it's never going to be anything of the sort.

Why is that weird? The "beggars" I was referring to are people looking for jobs, not employers, so those actually seem like things that would go hand in hand, since if all companies only want the best of the best there will be many people without a job. Thankfully it seems like companies all have a different idea of what the "best" is so I am still employed

How do you know it is you "dream gig" until you have actually worked there? Have you never been excited to accept an offer from a company only to get there and realize its just the same old bag of petty politics, egos, kool-aid drinking and grunt work?

Google, Facebook and the rest of the big SV companies that "only hire the best" are no different than any other big corporation. Also not everyone that works at these big SV companies gets to work on the really interesting and sexy projects.

There seems to be this myth that if you can just pass the Google or FB white board interview you will have it made and your "dream job" awaits. The propagation of this myth has given life to a whole cottage industry of prep courses and books on how to pass them.

I also think you have misunderstood the OPs position, I don't think they were saying that they were a programming god who can't dictate where they work, quite the opposite.