One thing i've come to believe is that interviews are broken not because of some cultural relic or clueless managers or unintentionally evil bureaucracies and processes but because of the engineers themselves. I've been a part of interview panels where during the voting I think "well shit, I wouldn't pass this either".

I also came to believe that the questions I historically asked were also mostly pointless. They were either cookie cutter things from googling "how do ininterview" or things i thought up myself to go on an ego trip of seeing how well a person matched my specific thought process.

The process was heavily biased towards the type of person who would memorize "cracking the coding interview" who would often be people who would overcomplicate things and rapidly create terrible abstractions because the only thing they knew was making things DRY. Then there's the positive feedback loop that comes with this and the resulting codebase of increasing complexity from everyone trying to prove that they're smart.

It's ridiculous. Though i suspect it's intended. The other trait this process filters for is heads down order taking and the specific type of discipline necessary to memorize a dictionary. Also, the long hours of someone trying to prove their worth. A benefit in large companies.