A good chunk of these people will be good engineers that cannot talk about or show the stuff they worked on at their previous job. And those places specificall

A good chunk of these people will be good engineers that cannot talk about or show the stuff they worked on at their previous job. And those places specifically ban them from making apps or working on open source and they will be hard workers that work 40-50+ hours a week. Maybe they have kids too. How do you interview these people? I agree, algo interviews are annoying and I wish it wasn't there. If it wasn't it would make switching jobs a lot faster. But thats what it is. The suggested alternative of portfolio work has it's own problems, the same with homework problems. Unfortunately, even places that have you write code with the internet still have an algo inteview or two.