I understand the frustration, but at the end of the day I think they do serve a purpose. They're not great at that purpose, but they're good enough and they generally produce false negatives (smart people fail) rather than false positives (you hire an idiot). And this makes sense, because a false negative is low cost (maybe you spend 50% longer interviewing candidates) but a false positive is high cost (you hire an idiot and have to spend months establishing that, firing them and starting the hiring process again).
The side effect of this though, is that it's an extremely painful process for the applicant. Even if you're a great software engineer, you're going to freeze up, miss something, have a bad day, and fail a few interviews. Now for most software engineers failure is an unusual and harrowing experience, so they react really badly to it. Especially ina
scenario where it's difficult to blame anyone but yourself. But just don't! It's fine! just move on, there's plenty of jobs and the interview process is a blunt tool, not a final evaluation of your worth in life.
The side effect of this though, is that it's an extremely painful process for the applicant. Even if you're a great software engineer, you're going to freeze up, miss something, have a bad day, and fail a few interviews. Now for most software engineers failure is an unusual and harrowing experience, so they react really badly to it. Especially ina scenario where it's difficult to blame anyone but yourself. But just don't! It's fine! just move on, there's plenty of jobs and the interview process is a blunt tool, not a final evaluation of your worth in life.