People do it because it works on average. Also, job requirements are usually entirely unrealistic, so obviously not a single honest person can apply. Even worse: Honest people are forced to lie to get a chance at all. Glad, freelancing works for me.

Like, I'm sorry if you're not cheating in interviews, you're fucking yourself over.

If you're not the top person in your Ivy League class with a 5.7 GPA Being scouted by the big leagues in your field, then you should be cheating and doing everything you can to get every single advantage for yourself that you possibly can.

Otherwise the companies you're applying for are just going to fuck you over as hard as they believe they can get away with.

You may not like it, but that's capitalism, baby, and the sword of damocles cuts in both directions.

A mirror. You might have need of one.

On top of the other comments here about how capitalism is bad and coding interviews are generally bad, I wonder what your parameters are. Does the job description actually include your stack? Are you interviewing people who casually list JavaScript or python but don't have relevant coding experience? How much time is given and what is the extent of the question?

If you're not paying people for their time, and you're asking them to do an at home assignment that has potentially no relevance to their expertise or the job they will be doing, all within a short timeframe what do you expect?

Unpopular take, but I think a short practical question, or maybe some verbal pseudocode stuff is fine, but I've had to run interviews as well so I get the struggle of finding a good fit.

As an aside, I've known some good code monkeys that can't design or explain anything, but given a direction they will hammer out a mvp in record time. Sometimes you have to pick the right tool for the job. Good coders aren't always good designers and vice versa. That's my hot take for the day.

Just hire them. No "interview" needed.

Imagine doing coding interviews but calling other people cringe.

Is this an interview over text? How is someone looking things up mid-way through a (phone? video?) conversation and expecting it not to be obvious that's what they're doing?