Please stop the coding challenges

You could also, you know, talk to people, like we did before Google and the Silicon Valley bro-wanna-bes decided that coding interviews was the only solution.

I've hired plenty of people without having coding challenges or any form of live coding. I've been happy with all of those hires. A former co-worker did some take-home coding tasks, which they'd then talk to the candidate about during the interview. I feel like those hires where worse in may ways, they certainly didn't stay around as long. That may very well be completely unrelated obviously.

For years people have been complaining that exams aren't realistic, that some talented people just don't do well in an exam situation and we've mostly come to the consensus that this is correct and mistakenly filter out highly talented people. So why wouldn't we apply the same logic to hiring?

If you're hiring for a specialist position some coding exercise can absolutely be in order, but I can't think of any reason to have them for a junior position. So I wouldn't recommend dropping coding tasks completely, but I'd apply them more selectively, otherwise you risk missing a number of really good hires.

Part of it may also be that so many companies and interviewers are absolutely terrible at doing coding challenges, but do them anyway, because Google and Facebook do them.

I admit I've been hired once from just a friendly chit-chat, but I can't see how this could be reliable. There are so many bullshitters in the industry, who, during character creation put all their skill points into Charisma. They are smooth talking, good looking, and have all those charming Ivy League mannerisms of an Investment Banker or Enterprise Sales person. And while they might not be able to be technically deep enough to fool an engineer interviewer, they will absolutely fool the director or VP who does the final screen and has the final say. These kinds of people flock to companies who don't do robust technical screens.

I can see your point about the bullshitters being able to fool a VP, but in that case they wouldn't be doing the coding interview anyway.

On the other side we're also seeing bullshitters that can ace any leetcode challenge, but not actually design anything of value or work well with others.

There's probably not a one-size fits all, but if you're going to do coding interview do them well and understand many don't do well in these types of interviews because they don't see the value, or feel that their other skills are being ignored.