The number of law school graduates has always exceeded the number of computer science graduates (yes a comparison of a graduate degree to an undergraduate but CS majors rarely need another degree).
If it takes someone more than an hour to determine a programmer's basic worth, then they should fold up shop. The extra 4 hours is a waste of both side's time. You won't really know how good the person is until they are working for weeks or months so how to do you expect to learn this in 5 hours?
I've said all of this many times on my blog as well. Sadly the only people who read my blog and live on this site are the hirees. The hirers never visit and remain ignorant.
Groupon was always a ponzi like scheme. Once they ran out of suckers (err businesses) their income dropped like a rock. Everyone I know uses Groupons but challenge them on actually visiting the Grouponee again and you hear crickets.
Seriously funny rant. I don't use Rails since I do mobile stuff now but I once wrote a rant about PHP and wound up liking it later. But PHP is trivial to get into and Ruby/Rails is not.
It's no different in the iphone/android app businesses. There are many companies that promise to push you up to #1. We tested one and it worked for 3 days, but it's useless for most apps. They pay or give freebies to people in Asian or African countries to download your app and try it once. For $10,000 it worked like a charm, we went from 100th+ to 1st in the category in one day. Three days later we started dropping and in a few more it was back to the usual. It's a really crummy way to get real customers but I know other people pay on a regular basis to stay in the top 10 just so they keep visible. We won't do that again since the customers aren't real but it was an eye-opener. There are more sophisticated companies that can create the same buzz with better customers but they all cost a lot more $. You can game anything if you are willing to spend the cash.
At every job when I started no one knew me yet and I didn't push for change. I focus on simply doing the best I can do and after you deliver high quality software (or whatever you are doing) and push out small ideas the actually improve things you get usually get a reputation as someone who is worth listening to. Then you can push a little harder. Until then you can't do much. Evidence of being smart is always better than claiming it.
I once had a 5 week contract at a University where I saw everything the group was doing was a horrible security nightmare but the manager had no interest in anything I might say and made it clear; by the end after delivering way more on my part than anyone thought possible suddenly the manager wanted to know everything I had to say and then made sure it got fixed.
The argument not being made here is this: why should you be able to patent DNA sequences? Sure Monsanto is patenting the method to create the sequences, but enforcing the end result of the method (seeds) doesn't make any sense as a patent. It's like patenting a machine that makes widgets, then suing people who don't use the widgets the way you'd like them to.