Add me to the list of people who acknowledge the problem but haven't heard any alternative. Every job opening, you encounter people who can talk and act like software engineers, but can't write code. I've been in the business for about a quarter century now, and looking back at times that teams decided to overlook someone's failure to demonstrate coding skills in interviews, sometimes it has turned out they can write code, but often not.

Younger engineers trying to find jobs in the industry should consider how much the other parts of the hiring process privilege older engineers regardless of ability. I'm sure many of the people I worked with who lacked basic coding competence twenty years ago still lack competence and are employed right now in jobs that require it, jobs that could go to younger, more capable people except that their resume, their experience, and their ability to say the right-sounding thing don't match up.

Hiring someone to write code without ever seeing them do it is like hiring a guitar player for a band by verifying their MFA in music theory, talking to them about music for an hour, and checking their references. All that is fine, but can they play the guitar? You can acquire everything else, the lingo, the knowledge of music theory, the pros and cons of competing techniques, the familiarity with current and past great performers and performances, without ever putting your hands on the instrument. And some people are built like that. Some people are guitar connoisseurs: they gave up their hopes of playing the instrument long ago, but they're huge fans and nerd out over the art and science of it. If those folks needed to be in a band to have health insurance, and they didn't have to audition, you can bet some of them could talk their way into it.

Finally, when a team interviews someone for a position that requires writing code, they are inevitably making a judgment about whether they think they can do it. If you ask someone to guess without any direct evidence, you're inviting them, almost forcing them, to fill the gap with bias. Do they collect subtle little hints and make fragile deductions like they're Sherlock Holmes? Do they trust their instincts about whether the person in front of them looks and acts like the kind of person who could code? Either one is guaranteed to be rife with bias and problematic preconceptions.