Earlier quoted context omitted.
This resonates. I'm terrible at big tech company interviews--kind of a generalist, read Cicero rather than Knuth in college, tend to start out problems kind of muddled, etc. After a while I concluded the only way to get into large SV companies was to sell a company to them. It's easier to go through due diligence than the corporate interview process in a lot of places. (That's how I got my current job.)
I spent most of my college evening getting drunk with philosophy majors and pretending my math degree meant more than my CS fallback -- but I haven't found the corporate interview system to be that terrible. I do however think it's a game that conflicts with certain personality types, including myself early in my career. I'm always curious what you (or anyone else!) think could be done better.
1.) They select using criteria that are easy to test, such as writing quicksort on the fly. That's a small part of engineering --you also want people who can recognize big-picture patterns and communicate them clearly. This is a lot harder to evaluate so many interviewers simply don't.
2.) They select for people who are already in similar positions. For instance, white-boarding kubernetes application design is pretty easy if you are already doing it. As an interviewer it does not really tell me much about your ability to think originally or whether you can adapt.
Getting around these biases is hard. One way I test people now is to ask them to show me their favorite design or code and explain exactly how it works. That starts them off on comfortable ground. Then I start to tweak the boundary conditions to see if they can adjust creatively. It removes the stress factor and is a lot more illuminating than coding up something totally new from scratch, especially if you only have 45 minutes to extract as much information as possible about somebody's thought processes.
Very interested in other thoughts on this topic. It's a hard problem.