Agree. Our interview technique is a trimmed down but somewhat realistic coding exercise. We do it as a pair programming exercise and we tell them up-front that

Agree. Our interview technique is a trimmed down but somewhat realistic coding exercise. We do it as a pair programming exercise and we tell them up-front that this should be an interactive and positive experience, we're not trying to trick them or put them under pressure. It'll test the candidates ability to actually do the job they'll be doing if we hire them, which is to write code in an IDE. We do it with them, so they can ask questions on libraries they're not familiar with and so on. Obviously we're not going to solve the problems in exercise for them, but if they do get stuck, we'll help move them forward. The coding exercise will involve writing tests, deisgn of classes, working with floating point arithmetic, working across thread barriers, some fairly standard maths, and so on. I actually can't say we're hired a bad candidate yet and they all report that the interview is a positive experience. In my fairly long career I've been through about 10-15 interview processes. A few of them were quite toxic and those were the "just cram leetcode for months" type. I never want to inflict that on someone else.