I’m not saying that all candidates should be interviewed without ever meeting or interviewing the candidate face-to-face; rather, I was speaking specifically of the coding interview portions. In these segments, face-to-face doesn’t really matter IMO, since it’s all about the candidate’s problem-solving ability.

Yes there’s a lot of “bias hysteria” out there, as you put it, but I would dispute that advocating “author-blind meritocracy” falls into that category.

Quite the contrary: An author-blind review process would actually make any bias impossible — either for or against any particular identity group. It seems to me most people should be able to get behind that, but maybe I’m wrong.

In fact, the main opposition to author-blind meritocracy is the “post-meritocracy” movement which is slowly making its way into open-source projects codes of conduct.