[elq]

Oddly enough, people lie, unknown references can be bullshit.

The cost of hiring someone who is incompetent is high. High enough that companies generally make several attempts at finding and filtering people that might be incompetent. I don't think anyone who interviews programmers actually believes the standard technical interview process is fun or necessarily even accurate, but there's nothing else as low cost to implement that works better.

Further, someone who treated a technical problem in an engineering interview as a "shit test" would be walked out at any company I've interviewed for... Good luck with that!