That is crazy. The tech market in the US is going crazy. I constantly have recruiters messaging me on LinkedIn and they are making $20k per placement.
I have around 10 to 15 contact requests a day on linkedin from recruiters but I think the problem is more with the junior guys.
I'll tell ya why you didn't get the job. You're not an H1-B. You were brought in to be interviewed as cover to make everything seem on the up-and-up. Doesn't really matter anymore when you know how to trade for a living. That's when all that programming knowledge and over-education comes in handy.
A significant portion of programming jobs are at startups, and it's exceedingly rare for a startup to use the H1-B process. Even among bigger corporations there are a known number who use/abuse the H1-B and the rest don't. Those in the former category are well known in the industry. So if you genuinely think that's a problem and aren't using it as an excuse or reflecting a political agenda, simply don't apply to the limited universe of firms that use H1-Bs. Simple solution.
#6, outsourced hiring “services” like Codility are pretty much the new reality. It's just a piece of our new, automated, overly-optimized world. As programmers, we brought this upon ourselves. Just be thankful you're not a truck driver.
What is wrong with that? If you're a good programmer you have nothing to worry about? Is there any specific bias or problem with those services that make them evil? It just seems that they are making the process more efficient, which should be good for all participants involved?
As someone who learned the hard way by outsourcing my developers as a new entrepreneur and now working with an internal team...it does tend to hurt professional developers when their job is commoditized. If you're competing for new business you're competing against a bunch of guys who post ridiculously low hourly rates, then take 5-10X longer to come up with a crap product than a good team would. To the extent that you have to compete in this race to the bottom it's far worse if you're the competent dev.