> If past experience of doing the actual job is bad indicator and these test are not a good proxy, then according to your logic, experience is worthless and we should all optimize for these tests.
How do you assess and verify past experience of doing the actual job? That's the tough nut to crack and that's why they ask questions to assess your ability on the actual job. There are a lot of decent engineers out there with tons of experience and there is an equal number of below average engineers with tons of experience out there. How do you hire just the top 10%? As most work is done in teams how do you verify the candidate isn't selling his teammates accomplishments for his own while he contributed little of value?