I'm not saying technical interviews are good or bad. I just think it's a different skill from what a student generally learns.
I just don't get the modern interview process. Why are we looking for lint in human form? I'd rather see someone sketch some psuedo-code for an interesting problem with several acceptable solutions.
I think I learn more by asking a fuzzy, underspecified problem question and seeing what clarifying questions I get back. I want to know if the person can wring a spec out of a customer - coding it up with all the semicolons in the right place is the easy part.
>> Most people I knew at MIT had a full time offer they were happy with from their Junior year internship by their senior year.
This leads me to think that top-universities student are already "chosen/watched" by companies before the recruitment phase so both companies and student are much more confident they can work together.
So basically, top companies just recruit people the best way : by looking at students while they are still student. Which is fine, except the top universities are, I guess, the most expensive ones. But if that is true too, then that's another bias : companies have rich employees, so they hire people with the same set of personal values...
Not necessarily, of course, but it'd be pretty surprising if it didn't trend in that direction.