Happily employed and had no trouble with coding interviews myself. So my opinion isn’t from some personal angst about passing this bar: I found it easy.

That said: I’m tired of the attitude that there is no effective alternative to this style of interview. You do know we hired people to do engineering jobs for many decades before the industry started cargo culting what they observed a handful of Silicon Valley mega-companies doing. Plenty of very competent people were interviewed and hired before this “relive your algorithms class final on a whiteboard” style interview process became the thing to do.

These interview processes are not the only way. As I said: it’s cargo culting where insignificant companies try to act like Google or some other giant in hopes that perhaps the billions in revenue will start rolling in if they mimic them. To me this behavior is no different than “founders” who adopted dress styles and presentation mannerisms imitating Steve Jobs a decade or so ago. …And bloggers who can’t resist the “considered harmful” trope.