How are companies supposed to evaluate candidates without giving them some form of busywork? The best way I can think of is to pay them to complete a project but that's not possible when you are interviewing loads of candidates.
In general teams are a much better judge of talent and ability than recruiters or your typical interviewer, especially in a normal work setting.
One thing I used to totally loathe during my brief stint as a programmer employed at a large organization is that when new people showed up that were already hired it was then up to us on the floor to make the best of a whole series of bad decisions preceding that moment.
So, let's involve the team in the messaging and pre-selection as well as giving them the final say.
Think about it this way: if you believe that the team you employ is the best possible group to do the work, don't you feel they are also the best possible group to determine how to expand the group?
This is still far less effort than a wrong hire would cause. Anyway, I can see that my methods are not acceptable (yet), maybe in another decade or so?
Trust is hard. Even companies that trust their tech people with the corporate crown jewels still have a hard to impossible time trusting them with such everyday decisions such as who they want to work with. It's counterproductive to say the least but that's how we've been doing it for the last 40 years, so I don't expect any major changes in the near future.
Instead of people complaining about coding interviews on HN, you would have a lot of programmers complaining that they are introverts who are just good at their job, and don't think that they should be punished for not being a people person.
If the world were gamified to the point that your skills are all that matters then yes, a solely merit based approach would work. But in the world we live in today people skills matter (a lot, actually). On a personal note, this was a very hard lesson for me to absorb, the first years of my career introvert would have been too friendly a description, anti-social probably would have been a better one. But over time I got a bit better at working with others.
What are you talking about? The interviewers are almost always from the team.
> Think about it this way: if you believe that the team you employ is the best possible group to do the work, don't you feel they are also the best possible group to determine how to expand the group?
Yes, and that's why most companies have their devs do interviewing.