Yes, companies are truly horrible at measuring programming ability. A lot of talent ignored, a lot of spaghetti coder freaks hired.

I worked for a quant finance project. People played with Rubics cubes while in meetings instead of listening to each other. The code looked like "Im so clever I dont fucking care how messy this s*** is". You could seen in the code it was narcissist and actually company (software) performance, despite hiring >70% PhDs, subpar.