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You've got a CS degree, 15 years of battle scars from production incidents, and you've probably saved at least three companies from bankruptcy with your code. Company A sees this and thinks "wow, let's pay this person a decent salary!" Meanwhile, Company B looks at the same resume and decides the best use of everyone's time is to make you reverse a binary tree on a whiteboard while three engineers judge your handwriting.
The tech hiring process is basically Schrödinger's meritocracy—your experience simultaneously matters everything and nothing until the recruiter opens your application. Nothing says "we value your decade and a half of expertise" quite like asking you to solve puzzles that have zero correlation with actual job performance, then ghosting you after wasting 20 hours of your life.
At this point, that plumbing apprenticeship is looking mighty attractive. At least pipes don't ask you to implement a LRU cache from scratch.
