I've found some companies are so process bound that they'll go the full set of interview, test, coding rounds even for a personal referral.
I have over 20 years of experience, and then they wonder why I start laughing when they start asking the newbie basic questions. It get even more absurd when they start asking about stuff that no one does more than once or twice a year except in very "edge case" type jobs. I'm a sysadmin, not a full time software developer, but I still get the dweebs who want me to do a leetcode b-tree sort with whatever fancy algorithm they read about last weekend in the hot language du jour.
I have over 20 years of experience, and then they wonder why I start laughing when they start asking the newbie basic questions. It get even more absurd when they start asking about stuff that no one does more than once or twice a year except in very "edge case" type jobs. I'm a sysadmin, not a full time software developer, but I still get the dweebs who want me to do a leetcode b-tree sort with whatever fancy algorithm they read about last weekend in the hot language du jour.