[isugimpy]

Having just gone through the interview process with a very well known tech company, as someone who is honestly pretty terrible at interviewing, I think some companies actually get it. It's really a matter of the interviewer at play. Two of the phases I went through really aligned with the company's needs. I was interviewing for a SRE position, and in one phase they gave me a broken EC2 instance that had been manually configured and asked me to get it back up and running. That's a legit task that I've had to do in daily work for years, because there's ALWAYS going to be someone that does a quick hack to get something working and forgets to productionize it. It was a completely contrived box that didn't actually serve customers, but still a good exercise. In another phase, they had me completely blind fire design some infrastructure (without a complete picture of what the current state of the application is) to lead toward a scalable solution for a real problem they're facing. While, yes, that's basically them getting me to do unpaid work, since I didn't put hands on a keyboard during it and really just talked it through with them, I feel like that was a great exercise in seeing how I thought and could work with a member of the team.

There's no truly bulletproof solution to interviewing, because the needs of every org are different, and the skills of interviewers are rarely nurtured to the point of usefulness. Sometimes you just have to luck out and get a good interview.