alt Hacker News> nothing to do with how people are graded
If by "nothing to do with" you mean "uncorrelated", then this is very trivial and empirically untrue. There are a lot of tests that correlate with peer and manager-rated performance in software development (and many other roles).
Even the dumbest most ad hoc unrelated tests will have nonzero correlations, and the well-studied principled ones much more so.
The better argument is that tests are high effort and can feel demeaning. But it's not productive to pretend they don't work.
This has not been my experience. Granted, I’ve never worked for a FAANG-like company, but in my 20 years of writing code for a living I’ve seen a lot more unknown unknowns in my day-to-day work compared to what school had prepared me to handle.