It manages to work because expensive law schools and the state Bar do all of those things on behalf of her law firm. Meanwhile you can call yourself a programmer after taking a 30 minute online tutorial and writing a hello world script – and that is a good thing. We do not need gatekeeping in this profession.

I'd rather deal with obnoxious interviews any day.

But the legal profession, in terms of fairness for new grads, is perhaps the worst of all professions, I'm told. Basically, if you go to a top school you make 3x the average graduate based on that alone. While there is a decent correlation between school and talent, it is by no means strong enough to justify the phenomenon. Certainly it is not like this in other developed countries.

Computer Science has unfortunately been headed in that direction but at least an A+ graduate at a state school has a chance at getting the better offers.

Probably because they use the ones you mention. They think an ideal engineer should be able to cold solve some level 5 leetcode problem using a Trie with some trick edge case to perfection in 90 minutes as if they are some sort of mathlete. It's not very realistic to what you do day to day and required dedicated studying simply to pass the test, not to advance myself as an engineer.

If they used level 1 questions as a fizz buzz esque filter for string manipulation, iterator tactics, and maps/sets, then I'd have no issue. I'd get why you may test a student for a junior position harder but a senior dev should have actual professional experiences to dig into.

If you can't trust them to code then maybe you should in fact do the FAANG method and describe what exact concepts you want prospective hires to be able to talk about and work with. Haven't seen that outside of FAANG tho.

Half of developers are below the median and, to paraphrase Upton Sinclair, "It is difficult to get a man to support something, when his salary depends on his not supporting it."