The justification foe the assessment is that the assessment is the defined set of hoops that the company who you are trying to get paid by has assigned.
1. They are considered high performers (maybe promotions are on a schedule?)
2. They are actually high performers (some people can bullshit their way through a job for years).
3. They are outperforming a hypothetical person who didn't cheat on the test and would have been hired instead of them with an honest assessment.
In short, the interview process worked as intended.
Maybe to the interviewer. But for the applicant the goal is to achieve an outcome.
I can assess his abilities either way.
So maybe features will get implemented but rules and laws not necessarily respected.
And perhaps that’s useful for some companies.
When I used to run interviews (no longer working) I’d learn the most from seeing how candidates resourcefully used google, skimmed results, found relevant info. That was immediately revealing.
"OK, take two weeks and create a feature."
"No, not like that."
Two weeks worth of contractor rates for a finished feature as an interview? Sign me up!
I saw companies state that openly. E.g. saying: we’re all competent programmers, none of us like leetcode and we don’t use that in our actual job, but we need a way to filter candidates and this seems the best practical solution.
Again, perhaps desperate people and/or hustlers make for a good workforce, especially in some companies.
BUT, it means that Amazon creating a selection pressure for people who cheat. Long term this will be corrosive to the organizational fiber of the corporation as idiotic unrealistic leetcode questions are to the technical fiber.
Amazon has become way buggier for me over the last few years and so has Google. I think this is intimately connected to their organizational dysfunctions.
People are just riding these organizations down as they crash, starting at the very top with the CEOs. The same feeling extends to the countries and societies where these things operate. Vultures upon a corpse.
And yet rarely reciprocated beyond what's explicitly required by law.
</ Tangent >