TL;DR - I ramble uncontrollably, don't bother reading.

I think it's interesting how the industry got here with the interview/job hiring process. I remember being a team lead back in 1999 and having this responsibility of interviewing devs and trying to figure out who to hire. I was 29 and my experiences were highly varied (degree in philosophy, 3 years working in a group home care taking developmentally disabled, static html monkey, lone java/perl dev for a tiny local company, and now team lead productizing a whacky Xerox PARC research project), but not a lot of specific industry experience. I wasn't good at making the hiring choices.

I made some good ones, and some bad ones, and had little to no idea how to distinguish them. One guy I hired because he also had a philosophy degree (!). Turned out to be one of the better ones, lol.

10 years later, and I'm again a manager and in charge of making hiring decisions, 2010-12 timeframe, and feeling the need to do better at judging applicants. FizzBuzz was a thing around this time, and I created a little take home test I would send to people with resumes I liked. It was very free form, just asking people to make a simple command line app I could run, with input and output requirements to solve a fun game-ish problem. (I cared nothing about the performance properties of these programs, after all, at the time I was working with science/math folk who would write k-means algorithms that took 5 DAYS to cluster 2000 data points. You can't make that shit up).

At the same time, some companies were ramping up how long it took to go through their interview process, and it was obnoxious. Just wasting hours upon hours of my time asking the most inane technical "gotcha" questions, and half the time the interviewer was less informed than the interviewee, and that never worked out well for the interviewee!

Then leet code came around, post 2015-ish, and I started getting asked to write code live in interviews. I'm not one to freeze in that circumstance - I've always liked tests - but I know others who did and l can't see holding that against anyone. I certainly freeze in other circumstances!

Now, in 2022-present it's all thrown at you. Take home. Live leet coding. Endless rounds and hours of interviewing (though, interestingly, my current, fully remote job came as a result of a single interview where I just shot the shit with two people for about 40 minutes and then they hired me - none of this is universal, it's just general trends).

In my experience, looking back at all the people I've worked with, that I've been even tangentially involved in choosing to hire, and there would be dozens of examples in my experience, none of it mattered too much. People hired on a gut whim worked about just as well as people put through the wringer. I suspect I could have a 30 minute conversation with a prospective hire - in person - and do as well in choosing as any amount of testing, rounds of interviewing, # of people involved in the decision.

The success rate was abysmal, as a rule.

And that seems to me what is driving the industry into these convulsions and horrific hiring practices. And you combine it with so much of it being remote, and that is just so much harder. Body language conveys sooo much. If I were to start a company myself, be a founder, I would not go looking for remote workers. Sad to say - I love working from home - but it's very sub-optimal. But even beside that, the people hiring in this industry have PTSD from all the bad hires they've made that didn't work out and dealing with that was expensive and painful. They're trying anything and everything to avoid those failures.

And they're still failing. Really badly.

IMO, the main problem is bad interviewers. It's not about process or testing, it's about personal judgement. And personal judgement in our society/culture has generally been disallowed more and more. You can't just hire whom you like. You can't go on gut (ie, implicit biases). It has to be objective. You have to be able to cover your ass and point to a process you followed. All that, etc. But, IMO, there simply are people who make these judgements better than others, and they should be empowered to do so. And it's really difficult to judge who judges well, and you'd need to collect data on that and so forth. And none of that really fits well in our current cultural climate. Managers don't like being held accountable, and so prefer to have a brain-dead process to follow.

I don't have a solution, other than more delegation and more empowerment given to people and teams lower in the hierarchy, to do things their own way and all that, and help them succeed more than they fail, but failure will always happen.