Comment by anal_reactor
7 hours ago
People have a thing that they mimic the behavior of those above them in the hierarchy. CEO used a meme once because they thought it's funny, then everyone did this in order to mimic CEO.
Why was leetcode so popular? Because Google did it and they were the cool kids at the time.
Being a grey beard, white board tests were popular because we didn't have an applicant pool experienced in software development. So we gave people logic and problem solving tests to see if they had the right type of thinking/temperament to train them up to be software devs. They didn't evolve into the trash they are now until later.
And that started when we hired a couple people who were into competitive programming an started an event/contest