It&#x27;s not about selectivity in general. It&#x27;s about companies not testing for relevant skills when they interview.<p>Reciting the implementation of some obscure algorithm from memory is entirely irrelevant to the daily job of a software engineer. Being able to do that does not make you a good software engineer, and most good software engineers cannot do that.<p>They do these &quot;programming trivia&quot; style interviews because it makes them feel clever and superior to the interviewees, and because it&#x27;s a lot less work for them than conducting an interview that actually probes what level of software engineering talent the candidate has.