>In my decade of professional software development has this not appeared once. Not even remotely.
I don't say this to personally attack you, but Google and other top tech companies have made it clear that years of experience no longer holds the same weight as other industries, perhaps because other industries are more tightly regulated with what its members can do. Otherwise reference checks would handle most of the technical interview ("Did this guy actually build X, Y, and Z at your company?" "Yes." "Great!"). You can spend 10 years in a bad position and Google can't know every company to decide whether it should hire from your company or not.
This has been one of software development's strengths: literally bootstrapping yourself from "Hello World" to 120k+. It's hacks and cheat codes compared to becoming a doctor or physical engineer (the ones that need a license). It means a disadvantage upbringing can be overcome with time and tenacity. It's a romantic notion, but because of this, you have to evaluate the candidate or risk a bad hire. And bad hires, as we all know from the same echo chamber that gave us teach-yourself-boostrapping developers, can utterly ruin your business and you never want to be a manager known for making a bad hire.
Otherwise, we'd all take an exam, refresh it every number of years, and be free to disregard most of the technical interview. Getting well-regarded regulation and certification is no easy task, and I suspect there's not movement behind this because you can't kill people with software as easily as you can with a surgeon's scapel or a bad bridge.
The industry is actively fighting against glue-things-together developers by asking serious CS questions. It hasn't accepted that we have to branch the "Developer" position into more well-defined roles and add specialties (Security, AI, UI/UX). It hasn't accepted that a lot of work is actually glue-things-together.
I don't say this to personally attack you, but Google and other top tech companies have made it clear that years of experience no longer holds the same weight as other industries, perhaps because other industries are more tightly regulated with what its members can do. Otherwise reference checks would handle most of the technical interview ("Did this guy actually build X, Y, and Z at your company?" "Yes." "Great!"). You can spend 10 years in a bad position and Google can't know every company to decide whether it should hire from your company or not.
This has been one of software development's strengths: literally bootstrapping yourself from "Hello World" to 120k+. It's hacks and cheat codes compared to becoming a doctor or physical engineer (the ones that need a license). It means a disadvantage upbringing can be overcome with time and tenacity. It's a romantic notion, but because of this, you have to evaluate the candidate or risk a bad hire. And bad hires, as we all know from the same echo chamber that gave us teach-yourself-boostrapping developers, can utterly ruin your business and you never want to be a manager known for making a bad hire.
Otherwise, we'd all take an exam, refresh it every number of years, and be free to disregard most of the technical interview. Getting well-regarded regulation and certification is no easy task, and I suspect there's not movement behind this because you can't kill people with software as easily as you can with a surgeon's scapel or a bad bridge.
The industry is actively fighting against glue-things-together developers by asking serious CS questions. It hasn't accepted that we have to branch the "Developer" position into more well-defined roles and add specialties (Security, AI, UI/UX). It hasn't accepted that a lot of work is actually glue-things-together.