It also establishes depth and breadth of familiarity with a variety of fundamental topics demonstrated through exams and large programming projects: program design, networking, operating systems, security/cryptography, team software engineering practices, algorithmic techniques and analysis, etc.
You fundamentally cannot assess this as well as my alma mater can because my alma mater has 4 years of me working under realistic conditions (laptop, internet, colleagues, deadlines on the order of weeks) and you have, what, 5 hours of me standing at a whiteboard?
Credentials are seriously underrated.
CS programs are not created equal. If you find that candidates from a particular school aren't necessarily competent, then you should value candidates from better, harder schools. If you find that candidates from well-respected schools aren't necessarily competent, then you should respect them less (US News isn't always right) and respect other schools more.
Coding interview is just a baseline that everyone hired is expected to exceed. In most companies it does not really matter how well you did in coding interview - the only thing that matter is that you passed it. After that coding interview results are not really considered when choosing level (other than for junior engineers). Nobody expects senior engineer to be much faster when coding simple loop but he sure should be able to code it.
On the other hand design and behavior interview results are often have much more influence on final salary and level.
I don't think that is quite right. Interviewers claim coding interviews are necessary to weed out the large fraction of our industry that cannot write code at all. If they cannot code, then they did not successfully complete a good undergraduate program's worth of coding projects (they cheated, rode on the coattails of group members, were graded way too easily, or something). Otherwise they can code.
>Strong filtering on credentials harms companies who miss good programmers, and harms programmers who can't get jobs.
On the other hand, strong filtering on whiteboarding unnecessarily filters out people who don't do well under that kind of pressure but may be great programmers given a computer and a more realistic deadline. They also privilege people who have optimized well for whiteboard interviews but may be destructive in the longer term.
Which is why the optimal solution seriously considers both factors. (I'm arguing with you because you called credentials influencing hiring a "bad" thing).
The other stuff is harder to crack. I'd really like to see interviews that are more tightly anchored to real work/layer complexity by building on themselves, etc etc.