> but the best solution is to have trial work periods. There’s no better way to see how someone performs at the job than having them actually do the job.

> I agree trial work periods may not scale

Great to see the author uses the Green Lumber fallacy to argue against leetcode-style interviews. Now I'm going to guess he also must have skin in the game, otherwise he would only be an empty suit doing armchair recruiting.

Let's say we want to do work trial periods. I tell you what actually happened to us: we opened an internship position and we had ~1600 applicants. Since having 1600 trial periods is impossible, we need a way to weed this down to a manageable number. Congratulations, now you moved the problem of "who do we hire" to "who do we invite for a trial period".

The software engineering interview isn't perfect, but sadly trial periods are not the answer.