Please stop the coding challenges

The more people online complain about coding interviews, the more confident I am that they are the absolute best way to filter candidates for a software development job. Across the industry there are way too many talkers/pretenders/meeting schedulers and not enough people who can roll up their sleeves, jump into the code and actually get stuff done. And this problem becomes worse at higher levels. You can bitch about it all you want, but you aren't owed that cushy $500K/yr FAANG job. If you can't get yourself to brush up on basic programming and write some for loops then companies will simply move on to someone who will.

Yea, I happen to hate coding challenges, but not because they're hard--because they bias towards "people who have time to do coding challenges". That said you're absolutely right about how many phonies are in the industry and coding tests are probably the best we have to weed them out.

This goes beyond software interviews and is just how the world works.

"I want to work for your company"

"Ok, prove yourself"

"Sorry, I don't have time"

How do you expect that conversation to go from there? If you don't have time then make time. It isn't anyone's problem but your own.