2/2 p.s. there's a thing in music industry called the #GearAcquisitionSyndrome. It's when musicians are piling up all the tools, bells, whistles, instruments, synths, pedals, whatnot; and then waste all the creative time in gluing all of these to work together - instead of making music.

You need to take into account that both podcasts and audiobooks have started to muddle the long-form content pie. In short, I don't buy that people are ingesting less of long-forms; it's just that the medium and form is now more puzzling

Oh ok, so these are "obfuscated identity devs"; not fake devs per se. My first thought that these were just to waste time to HR; but I see your point now.

I'm puzzled here. What's the endgame for these fake dev candidates?