Technical interviews are a form of hazing. Engineers often suffer from imposter syndrome, especially during an interview. Those who have already been hazed and

Technical interviews are a form of hazing. Engineers often suffer from imposter syndrome, especially during an interview. Those who have already been hazed and accepted to the club will turn around and put potential candidates through the same humiliating process. And what's worse is that demonstrating you have superior capabilities in one area or another can be seen as a threat to the interviewer and they may give you a thumbs down based purely on their own insecurities. What ends up happening is that, just like in college fraternities, is that everyone ends up being similar, both culturally and in terms of abilities. If I had it my way I would do away with the interview process altogether and do something more akin to an internship. Potential employees could start their engagement with a company by working (for pay, mind you) on a very limited basis to solve actual problems that need solving (i.e. "write an algorithm that's 10% more efficient", "create a tooltip that's aware of the viewport in React", etc). Based on their output their engagement could be ramped up until they are brought on as a full time employee. That way it ends up being completely merit based. You can either solve these problems or you can't. And whether or not they ultimately end up becoming an employee doesn't end up mattering because both parties are compensated along the way. This would obviously put the burden on the company to boil its problems down into smaller, isolated efforts but that's something all companies should be trying to do anyways. In the end, they just want some code written that will end up solving some problem for their customer.