The problem is that you can't "just as easily" run the code test. The code test is unreliable -- bad developers who overfit their knowledge to trivia make it through. The code test also causes the really good developers to simply reject you, so you don't even get a chance to hire them, or even find out who they are.
You're basically saying you want to lop off the bottom 60% of an imagined Normal distribution. Except you're really only lopping off some of the bottom 60%, and some fraction of that bottom 60% gets through, and you're paying the cost of also lopping off the top 5% who think you're a joke of an employer for being way too worried about the costs for you to more substantively evaluate those bottom 60% folks -- especially since you, as an employer, are probably in the bottom 60% of employers anyway, yet are cargo culting to try to act like you only hire the top 0.000001% or something.
You get what you pay for. If you go cheap on candidate evaluation (e.g. lazy commodity HackerRank), you get the McDonald's version of a developer, all while acting like you're being extremely selective.
You're basically saying you want to lop off the bottom 60% of an imagined Normal distribution. Except you're really only lopping off some of the bottom 60%, and some fraction of that bottom 60% gets through, and you're paying the cost of also lopping off the top 5% who think you're a joke of an employer for being way too worried about the costs for you to more substantively evaluate those bottom 60% folks -- especially since you, as an employer, are probably in the bottom 60% of employers anyway, yet are cargo culting to try to act like you only hire the top 0.000001% or something.
You get what you pay for. If you go cheap on candidate evaluation (e.g. lazy commodity HackerRank), you get the McDonald's version of a developer, all while acting like you're being extremely selective.