On the contrary, I think most other industries do this (i.e. hire people based on mostly insane criteria).

I think programmers are more reflective and analytical than people from other industries, so programming as an industry gets a lot of flak from the inside, but I really believe it's no better anywhere else.

"Half of programmers can't program! What's wrong with this industry?" Half of everyone is completely and utterly incompetent at whatever they're paid to do, why do you think we're special? Programmers just happen to notice these things.

"The interview process is broken!" Yeah, so it is everywhere else, programming is just the only industry where someone would possibly even care about whether something is insane or not.

'Tis my two cents.

Weight lifting doesn’t have any direct use for any sport ( excpet weight lifting), and yet they do it pretty much in every preparation. Brain is a muscle, so showing that your brain is able to manipulate some moderately complex algorithms is always a good thing.

Do tryouts for the 100m team involve benchpressing? Nope.

Interestingly, the American Football NFL Scouting Combine, which can be thought of as roughly a tryout for the NFL draft, involves a test in which athletes must benchpress a set amount of weight (225lbs == ~102kg) as many times as possible [0]. Whether or not this is a good test for athleticism and performance in the NFL is very much debatable, but it is one area in which they're evaluated.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NFL_Scouting_Combine#Bench_pre...

Probably a reasonable test in a sport that requires a lot of pushing. Same reason the military like press-ups.

Sprinters do Deadlifts to increase their strength. Makes them run faster.

Then don't do the training. And volunteer your thoughts on the game to the interviewers. Very honest!

Sure. An interview is a two way process. Do I want to work for a company with a broken hiring process like that? A company that doesn’t respect a candidates time prior to the interview certainly won’t after they are hired. It’s implicitly an ageism filter too - looking for recent graduates or people with few out of work commitments. Similarly extensive homework assignments. All red flags.