Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I've interviewed dozens of people and never had that experience, because I check OSS contributions, professional history, and ask for code samples before I even engage with a candidate in a technical discussion. How are you supposed to hire 50,000 people a year with a process like that? It seems unlikely there are much more than 100,000 people with significant OSS contributions in total. Published material isn’t go…
> How are you supposed to hire 50,000 people a year with a process like that? This is a straw-man. What company has to hire 50,000 engineers a year? Facebook has (in total) ~10,000 engineers (hired over a decade+). Someone has nothing published and no OSS? Great, ask for code samples and the candidate to walk you through the code. It's completely trivial to fix the busted status quo, but people are invested in this n…
Most candidates don't have code samples laying around (e.g. they only write proprietary code for work), so asking for some is a non-starter in a lot of cases.
Another point worth of reflecting, your accomplishments in OSS say nothing of interviewing expertise, they are completely different skillsets. Companies may not hire in the order of 50k people a year, but interviewer calibration in a large org is absolutely a problem that isn't easily solved by just following the opinion of some random 6-digit salary SWE.
As someone who's interviewed in the order of a few hundred senior SWEs, I think there are good and bad ways to go about any interview format, including leetcode-style.
Complaining about how companies don't just throw away their interview practices in favor of [insert pet format here] doesn't really help, since it isn't really actionable.
We talk about the perils of full software rewrites, I think similar concerns exist for hiring as well.