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My take is:

- “big” tech companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft came up with these types of tech interviews. And there it seems pretty clear that for most of their positions they are looking for cogs

- The vast majority of tech companies have just copied what “big” tech is doing, including tech interviews. These companies may not be looking for cogs, but they are using an interview process that’s not suitable for them

- Very few companies have their own interview process suitable for them. These are usually small companies and therefore the number of engineers in such companies is negligible to be taken into account (most likely, less than 1% of the audience here work at such companies)

And what is wrong with being a cog? Not everyone is going to invent the next ai innovation and not everyone is cut out to build the next hot programming language.

Bugs need to be fixed. Features need to be implemented. If it weren't for cogs, you'd have people just throwing new projects over the fence and dropped 6 months after release. Don't want to be another cog? Join a startup. Plenty of those hiring. The reality is that when you work at a large company, you're one of 50,000 people. By definition, only 1% are in the top 1%.

Someone has to wash the dishes and clear the tables. Let's stop looking down at jobs just because it's not hot and sexy. People who show up and provide value is great and should be appreciated.

>And what is wrong with being a cog?

The interview process being a circus of how many hoops you'll jump through. Which in this case is upwards of 3 months of trivia, beauracracy, and politics. And these days they don't even give you the grace of a response; they may just ghost you.

But being a cog itself is personally fine. Work to live, not live to work. But leading people on to drop them on the tip of a hat is disrespectful of everyone's time. At least a 1-2 stage interview for a dishwasher or table busser is only wasting a few hours per role applied. Time is the most valuable resource we have, of course people want to use it carefully.

> And what is wrong with being a cog?

Human cogs are going to be phased out. I'm not an AI doomer who thinks engineers are going to be replaced across the board, but the need for a human being who functions like a robot is going away fast. We need humans to do what humans do well, and humans don't do well as cogs in a machine—machines are better at that role.

The days of leetcode interviews are numbered not because they're too easy to cheat at, but because they were always optimizing for the wrong traits in most companies that cargo culted them, and even the companies that used them correctly (Big Tech) are going to rapidly need a different type of interview for the new types of hires they need.

> You have now excluded amazing engineers who suck at talking about themselves in interviews. They may be great collaborators and communicators, but freeze up selling themselves in an interview.

This is the job of a good interviewer. I've run the gauntlet from terrible to great answers to the exact same questions depending on the interviewer. If you literally just ask that question out of the blue, you'll either get a bad or rehearsed response. If you establish some rapport, and ask it in a more natural way, you'll get a more natural answer.

It's not easy, but neither is being on the other side of the interviewer, and that's never been accepted as an excuse

> I guarantee you there is no shadow council trying to figure out how to hire "busywork" worker bees.

The council itself is made of "busywork" worker bees. Slave hiring slaves - the vast majority of IT interviewers and candidates are idiot savants - they know very little outside of IT, or even realize that there is more to life than IT.

> You have now excluded amazing engineers who suck at talking about themselves in interviews. They may be great collaborators and communicators, but freeze up selling themselves in an interview.

This was the norm until perhaps for about the last 10-15 years of Software Engineering.

> I guarantee you there is no shadow council trying to figure out how to hire "busywork" worker bees.

I didn't say that. I said that this style of interview was designed to hire pluggable cogs. As others have noted, that was the correct move for Big Tech and was cargo culted into a bunch of other companies that didn't know why their interviews were shaped the way they were.

> there would be "out of the box thinkers" who would go against your ideas and cause dissent. At that point, guess what? You're going to figure out how to hire compliant people who will execute on your strategy.

In answer to your original question: yes, I'm actively involved in hiring at a 100+ person engineering org that hires this way. And no, we're not looking to figure out how to hire compliant people, we're hiring engineers who will push back and do what works well, not just act because an executive says so.

> You have now excluded amazing engineers who suck at talking about themselves in interviews. They may be great collaborators and communicators, but freeze up selling themselves in an interview.

Only if you suck at making people comfortable and at understanding different (potentially awkward) communication styles. You don't have to discriminate against people for being awkward, that's a choice you can make. You can instead give them enough space to find their train of thought and pursue it, and it does work—I recently sat in on an interview like that with someone who fits your description exactly, and we strongly recommended him.