How do you know you're not the midwit? To me it seems quite reasonable that author is the one over complicating everything, and in reality coding interviews are just not that bad.

[edit: they're not that bad in the sense that hiring is a inherently lossy process of projecting something incredibly complicated, like skills, personality, motivation, and situation into a 45 minute interview where only 1 or 2 dimension can be measured. If you increase the time/cost and do hire fast fire fast, then fine, you can get a better interview process, but it's not free. Other industries use stamps and certs to do that sorting, also not cost free. Coding interviews, yes we all hate it, but it's all a tradeoff.]