I went with an XPS13 a couple years ago. Display is great (I'd say on-par with Apple), keyboard is far superior to the new MacBooks, touchpad is about 90% compared to MacBooks, and I'm pretty sure it's thinner. For sure the smaller bezel gives it a smaller footprint.
Battery life was pretty decent after autotuning power settings through powertop, too. Better than I'm getting on my current work-issued MacBook, at least.
Only real annoyance for me was the wifi, which would vanish off the face of the earth after resuming from suspend. But I was able to replace it with a $15 Intel, a tiny screwdriver, and some patience.
I've also been doing interviews for a few years at three different companies, and I've encountered it. It depends heavily on the quality of the recruiter. Good recruiters will attempt to filter out complete duds, bad recruiters will pack a clown car full of "rockstar candidates" that just wasted my time. There was one particularly bad instance where a guy with 10 years of experience and a masters degree got stuck for an hour trying to write a for loop. With unfettered access to Google.
So ultimately, it's the same core issue as the 2008 housing collapse. When lenders don't have to give half a crap about the borrower's ability to repay a loan, they just keep issuing bigger and bigger loans.
Battery life was pretty decent after autotuning power settings through powertop, too. Better than I'm getting on my current work-issued MacBook, at least.
Only real annoyance for me was the wifi, which would vanish off the face of the earth after resuming from suspend. But I was able to replace it with a $15 Intel, a tiny screwdriver, and some patience.