Running SST with Pulumi and it's been a great experience. Infrastructure and maintenance has been pleasant and SST's pre-fabs really make things easy to spin up resources.
LLMs really make it easy to quickly find documentation for me. Across a huge software project like Mediawiki with so much legacy and caveats, having an LLM parse the docs and give me specific information without me hoping that someone at Stackoverflow did it or if I'm lucky enough to stumble across what I was looking for.
They're not really working in that scenario - they are fund raising for their group which may be considered an exercise in interacting with other people, marketing, selling, and the value of money that helps their organization. This may sound similar to working but one is for fun and the other is more for survival and sustenance.
I believe this is the correct approach and I do a similar thing where I work. A pair programming challenge should be enough to identify a good fit candidate - being able to discuss how they are thinking through a problem, answering questions they have to elaborate on the problem, seeing how they debug, and how they search are very useful!
My years of experience, good work history, and solid interviewing isn't enough! I have to sit down and PROVE I'm worthy to bugfix software by taking my free time and doing homework. But that's not all! If I don't leave and breathe software, why am I even in the field?
I'll resonate your sentiment - software interviewing is such a burden on everyone. Yet I can't think of many other places that do this. Maybe some 'show previous work' which many can do, but what else? Any other careers that require you to do "exercises" and "live exercises" ?
The lack of a physical button to control camera and microphone access is really annoying. At least with a camera, I can cover up with a patch but I can't do anything about my microphone.
Apple TV's touch remote is a travesty. Their UI is equally annoying when you realize they advertise the Apple stuff first, and you have to click Home again to get to your main apps. Compare any of them to Roku, and Roku is a barebones, works as expected, channel choosing device.
While it's a solution, it's not a simple one. Developers don't have this luxury. Choosing an OS to support means supporting all the APIs and possible ecosystem that comes with it.