> Most managers would reach for the algorithms/hackerrank/leetcode because it's the least risk to them.

You mean it's least effort. Least risk would probably be hiring a private investigator to dig up everything about the candidate for the past 10 years.

It’s least risk in the same sense as “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM [/Microsoft/Oracle].”

In other words, there is actually substantial long-term risk involved in simply electing for the default solution, but it feels safe on the short term and won’t make you look bad to your boss.

That carries the significant risk of getting chewed out for being completely ridiculous.

Is it? It solves the problem of somebody lying on their resume. It's probably not that much more expensive than chewing through a dozen candidates over the course of a year without finding a single suitable match.

I think that's because HR tends toward avoiding false positives rather than false negatives, as the latter tends to be more expensive. Therefore, they would rather miss an ideal candidate in order to avoid the risk of hiring a sub-standard one.

In a perfect world, HR would understand the position well enough to properly vet it but in practice they tend to revert to easier measures like the ones described.

No, they do it because most don’t know how to interview. So, they just do what everyone else is doing.

I thought software engineers with even a hint of talent were in short supply? Have I read the market totally incorrectly?

The problem is that those are not the only ones that apply.

The problem is that there is no reliable metric with which to measure talent. There is no interview process at the moment that currently does this accurately.

I'd say the problem is lacking accreditation. It's bonkers a person given a CS degree is not understood to know CS well enough to render whiteboarding unnecessary.

For a medical doctor it suffices to gets one doctorate. I don't think hospitals will drill him on the core fundamentals of his craft similar to whiteboarding in cs. A patient arrives with a slight fever and a headache. Quick! Which lab tests would you assign him!

It's ironic that for a doctor that actually would make sense since it's something practical that is needed on the job. E.g. "Patient has those symptoms, what could it be?"

How do other fields actually deal with that? Electrical Engineering should be close to our software field... Are they asked to draw common circuits or so?

> Well, if I was a manager and there are about 200 developers like you with a GitHub and experience and open source contributions applying for about 3 positions

When is the last time a hiring manager had 200 good resumes for 3 positions?????

For most companies it is the opposite experience - many open positions, few good resumes, which makes me wonder why they work so hard on keeping people out

Big "celebrity" companies like Google do get flooded by huge numbers of resumes, which is one reason they have the hiring process they have.