| The answer is usually self selection and calibration at scale. Self selection is about people looking like minded colleagues. If everybody is crazy about solving riddles and participates in programming competitions that's what they would be looking for. Now, about the scale. Anything run at scale needs standardisation. You need to hire 100 senior developers. How do you know they have more or less same level? If every single interview is hand crafted, you'll either need to get all devs envolved (and not everybody is good at coming up with interview questions) or get standard questions and answers to allow a smaller group of people to deal with candidates and coding puzzles fit great there because they're slef contained and isolated. Every realistic question has multiple facets and that's what you get at the system design interview step. Another problem I've observed was that the more you give the same puzzles to candidates, the easier they look to you. What the means is that you as an interviewer either need to keep your self in check regarding your reactions or you're risking giving a bad interview score in situations where it's not really warranted or there is a chance that the next question you take will be the one you find more complex (to be equal to position level in your head) and that would push the level of questions up. That's another observation I had when some interview questions would become so complex that I knew some of the existing devs would fail the interview for sure. Does that give good results on the other end? I don't know, but what we definitely know is that there is the whole industry around leetcode to train peeople to pass these challenges specifically and that means that they only thing the interviewer know is that the candidate has put some effort to prepare for the interview meaning they're motivated to join the company. And maybe it's not the worst data point! Some companies actually explicitly mention this fact on their hiring pages. To add to it, big corps have different ways to make interviews objective in whatever sense they think and that by definition reduces the personal impact. "Why did you ask this question? We've never done it before, we'll need to have a group call to calibrate". After a handful conversations like this you'll just stick to the standard process. Is there a way to come up with a more human approach? Personal recommendations with some skin in the game I guess. I'm sure in some niche areas like browser engines all good devs know each other well and no interview is often necessary. |