>I favor letting candidates for programming or testing jobs show what they can do.

As nice as it is to see a company that actually does this, the hard truth is that the first line of resume-readers aren't the people who can separate the tech from the cruft. It's the HR drones who see the buzzwords and squeal in delight. Or, before them, the automated resume parsers that count the occurrence rate of buzzwords and top-tier colleges and allow/deny based on that.

Is it any wonder why the tech-minded gravitate towards (or create their own) startups? I don't know how it is for everyone else, but for me personally, if I wanted to go into marketing, I'd be in marketing. And getting a job in most companies these days is all about marketing.