Surely the generous pay is the biggest factor for retention?

Competition is ill defined in the labor market because people aren’t fungible. So it’s hard to really point to hard evidence, so and so practice leads to so and so change in salaries or increase in retention.

Aside, nobody said this guy was looking for a low paying job. High paying ones want leetcode.

Google will pay a higher salary to a 21 year old than a Miami firm will pay to someone with 10 years of experience. Nobody will ask you these puzzles outside of ~5 markets in the US. They also pay way less.

Anecdotally I would say job satisfaction is at least as important a factor in retention, at least until employees are old enough to have started a family.

Many young people (age 20-30) I know are in a situation where they are paid large sums of money ($100k-$200k) for extremely dull work. I've seen most of my friends from college quit their FAANG job in search of something more fulfilling, often at a 50% or more pay cut.

It would be a "tragedy of the commons"-like effect for companies that don't adhere. I would guess that is just an unintended effect and that there is no master plan behind making recruiting expensive, slow and inaccurate.

Or it's part of an organised cartel between the major SV employers to reduce salary competition and employee turnover.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

I am not ruling out the possibility that there is a "recruiting should be hell" cartel but I believe there is no general bad bureaucracy HR bloat cartel and that it is an unintended effect, hazing, esprit de corps, HR self interest etc. The conspiracies are probably more simple like "no poaching" or wage cartels?

That could be part of it, but I don't think it's the primary reason. Rather I believe it's just one example of a more general, emergent phenomenon in capitalism, in which the top decile of jobs in high paying careers converge to interview methods which are a legal proxy for IQ testing.

It is a game of cat and mouse between candidates and companies. The candidates want high pay and interesting work, and the companies want only the top n% of candidates for their work, for some metric of their choosing. However many candidates a company has to choose from, they will devise some way of choosing the best among them. The methods for determining the best become (in my opinion) increasingly pathological as the surplus of candidates increases. In tech, the result is that the past decade has seen a supermajority of the most lucrative, mainstream jobs moving to a local maximum: whiteboard interviews based on data structures and algorithms. In response, candidates have gamified the process of studying for these metrics using Leetcode, and so a cottage industry of adult test prep was born.

Other industries use extreme credentialism or other methods to cut down on the vast majority of resumes they see, and there likewise emerges a cottage industry of professional preparation to break into these careers at the highest level. The companies use these methods because they see an absolute glut of candidates and become risk averse to bad hires - because after all, if they can attract so much talent with high pay and prestige, why should they suffer possible duds? This is how we end up with the, "Google is okay with passing on false negatives but can't tolerate a false positive in their hiring process" reasoning.

It's funny/depressing to think all of my depression stems from not being able to do these problems fluently.