[regs]

It was much cooler to be jaded about the interview process last year.

But in all seriousness, I'm sure there are companies like the one you described and there are many that aren't that way. I'm certain that your blanket characterization of 'the interview process, at least in Silicon Valley' being broken is incorrect.

You don't need to come up with weirder and harder questions. You just want to give them something in a form that they haven't seen before. It makes them listen and think, which is what you're looking for.

I always look at an interview to be more like a code review than a unit test: it's not about getting the right answer, it's how you get there that tells me what kind of an engineer you are. In fact, if you get the answer too quickly or jump to it, even if I don't think you're cheating, I need to ask another question or make you explain yourself in depth so I can probe how you got there.