Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since the dot-com era

For context, I'm a L6 at FB right now and have more than a decade of experience. I've never seen tech interviews become as stupid as they are now. In the last 3 months I've applied to a few places, including one where I literally built from scratch what the hiring team wanted to do (and got promoted for it at FB), and I've never seen the difficulty of the programming rounds so high as now. In the company I mention I got asked 5 LC hard questions between the 2 phone screens and the first 4 interviews of the zoom "on-site". No relevance whatsoever with what I did before or would've done on that team. I don't know if I passed the first day, but I told them right after I finished I wouldn't be doing the next day of interviews. Other places while not as extreme were more or less the same, they expect the optimal solution in 20-30 minutes max with no hints so that they can ask you a more difficult follow-up question. Many places say they want to know about your "thought process" but it's complete bullshit. Changing jobs is literally a dice roll, depending on who you get as an interviewer: do you get a stickler who's gonna ask you a tricky mathematical problem and expect picture-perfect compilable code because he has a chip on his shoulder and nobody told him it was a stupid way to hire a generalist, or do you get someone who's asking a reasonable problem and mostly looking for signals that you're a well rounded engineer, like choosing tradeoffs, being a team player, helping people around you, and so on. In my experience lately it's been mostly the first type. I don't know if it's simply bad luck or something else, but despite having a pretty good track record these companies are telling me I don't know how to program.

I know it's pretty much impossible for a no-name peon to change the current state of hiring in tech, so in the interviews I conduct I now only ask the hardest possible questions I can find and always put no-hire if the code is not perfect. I've blocked or helped block every single interview loop I've been in except when I knew this person was supposed to join our team directly if they passed, then we just had an reasonable problem and a good talk. My goal is to make hiring slow down to a crawl, make it so hard to find anyone that it hurts the company and is forced to change it. Maybe this is the kind of interviewer I've been finding, someone also fed up with the status quo In that case, I applaud you. The current way we do tech interviews is just idiotic and is absolutely not finding good engineers, it's finding people that lucked out to be in the intersection of "problems they practiced" and "problems you can get asked in an interview".

Although I think there's something to be said for very long term (years to decades) of high stress possibly qualifying for something similar to PTSD, but of course I'm not an expert on this.