Like I said the deadlines work for both sides. If a company wants to give homework instead of having their own senior engineers spend time talking to me, that tells me what I need to know about how they value my time.
That's not equivalent to what I said, nor is it live coding.
Again, those deadlines are artificially short compared to real world scenarios, and completely arbitrary. They are so short, in fact, that they render the interview an invalid test of real working ability. A work sample has been proven time and again to be the most valid measure of whether a candidate can actually perform the job, but the conditions under which a live coded "work sample" is performed in an interview render it invalid.
So says the companies that insist on multi-round, multi-week interview loops.
The legal environment is what it is and unlikely to change. The social environment is fickle and trend driven. Workers can't always fully evaluate their odds of success or the entirety of risk of leaving a job that's valuable for the employee and employer for one that might end up as a poor match, even if both sides have been transparent and honest. It's a difficult matchmaking problem with lots of external factors imposed and short term thinking on all sides.
Ideally young workers would have an early career period that involves a small number of short lived jobs, followed up by a good match that lasts decades, providing value to both the employee and employer. Much like finding a spouse used to be a period of dating followed by making a choice and sticking with it so a life could be built together, employment ideally should result in both sides making the other better. Today however everyone seems focused on maximizing an assortment of short term gains in search for the best local timescale deal at the expense of the long term. It's interesting how the broken job market and broken family formation process in the western world mirror each other so much.
There was a lot of social pressure in the past for permanent marriages. That doesn't mean they were happy marriages. With the social changes in the west in the 1960s, divorce became more socially acceptable. Legal changes meant women had the ability to join the workforce and support themselves. People in unhappy marriages had options to seek happiness elsewhere. Those options didn't exist before.
For job retention, the problem is that changing jobs is often the only way to advance. I lost my best worker because the suits wouldn't give him a raise. He now makes more than I do at a different company. He liked his job with us, but he tripled his pay by leaving. My coworkers all tell the same story. I'm one of the lucky ones that managed to move up in the company, and that's only because I had the boss over a barrel.