[faangguyindia]

why even interviews are necessary?

It all can be solved by a system where 1 company hires programmers then other companies can rent specific programer by hour and leave reviews.

This way a programmer doesn't need to interview, he's always employed and getting paid.

If they find no company to bid on your time, they can fire you after sometime.

[nwalters512]

A lot of (most?) useful work requires the kind of domain-specific knowledge that can only be built up over a lot of time spent working on a given team/product/codebase. "Renting" programmers here and there on an hourly basis might work fine for basic tasks, but would probably end in frustration for both the employer, who has to deal with a constant stream of random new people, and programmers, who are constantly bouncing from project to project.

[bluGill]

That depends. There are a lot of things a "by the hour" programmer can do when guided by domain experts. However a domain expert can only guide a couple such people and you lose their ability to get anything else done.

[walkabout]

The largest tech companies could also implement a shared cert program via some kind of industry group, with periodic re-certification requirements. This’d surely be far cheaper than all of them running multi-stage leetcode and system design interviews, and they already basically publish study guides so this isn’t even that different, just cheaper for both the businesses and candidates.

It’d also make job hopping far less painful (see above: cheaper for the candidates) which is why they don’t.

So we may conclude: the point of leetcode interviews is wage suppression.

[ModernMech]

Never gonna happen, as they outsource this certification to universities already. They're not going to stand up their own cert programs to streamline the process; the muli-stage leetcode interviews are about hazing culture and making sure employees are servile, not merit culture and making sure employees are competent and qualified.

Like you said, tech companies need candidates to feel like they barely passed a grueling interview because it makes them wary to jump ship and have to go through that again, not that they are well qualified industry professionals who have the credentials to move between jobs and work anywhere they are certified.

[kube-system]

You have reinvented software consulting. There are many criticism to that model as well.

[ttoinou]

   If they find no company to bid on your time, they can fire you after sometime.

In most of the world you can’t fire people like that

[hansvm]

> rent programmers by the hour

That's much less efficient for big software projects. The knowledge built up over time is one of the core things making you effective, so you have a big productivity loss if you don't retain the same people for a long time. With a continual middleman, the overhead from that "hiring" process is usually proportional to work done, so after a period of time it will have been more efficient for the employer to hire directly (even at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars) rather than to go through the middleman.

> leaves reviews

We've seen how well that works in every other part of the market.... Interviews are necessary because of a lack of trust. In your system, every party has an incentive to lie, and the incentives are strong enough that it's worth paying people to facilitate your lies. You see that with various contractors all the time, having somebody with good reviews take the contract and somebody with fewer skills actually do the work, the employer understating the work to be done, etc. Good people exist, but they're hard to find in a low-trust environment.

> always employed and getting paid

Interestingly, that usually benefits everyone except the programmer. As a rule of thumb, the person taking risks will have higher returns, so if you can afford those risks you should choose to take them yourself. Examples include various forms of device "warranties" (if you're paying, it's insurance, not a warranty, and I can afford the financial hit when a thumb drive fails, so I'm not going to pay a premium to insure against that possibility), some forms of actual insurance (full coverage on used cars is an example -- if my car is ever totaled I'll just buy another -- I have liability insurance out the wazoo, but full coverage isn't worth it), etc. Programmers often make gobs of money, so except for potentially the very beginning of your career you should be able to easily weather a few years without work. The exact contract details vary, but that would suggest then that programmers are better off on average cutting out the middleman providing those risk guarantees (and they're not really guarantees in the first place, right? people are currently without jobs because there are fewer programming jobs than there used to be, and no middleman scheme is going to fix that; you have to wait for this economic blip to blow over).

I could go on. Contracting is fine, but it's not a replacement for all salaried work.

[IAmBroom]

We have that already. It's called "temp hires". Mostly it just screws the employees, while the middle man gets richer.

I can't think of a reason why a highly skilled individual would sign up for that.

[creer]

Either somebody somewhere screens for competence, education, skill, talent, even bare willingness to do the work - or the project will suffer. Adding a level of indirection doesn't wolve that.