Please stop the coding challenges

The more people online complain about coding interviews, the more confident I am that they are the absolute best way to filter candidates for a software development job. Across the industry there are way too many talkers/pretenders/meeting schedulers and not enough people who can roll up their sleeves, jump into the code and actually get stuff done. And this problem becomes worse at higher levels. You can bitch about it all you want, but you aren't owed that cushy $500K/yr FAANG job. If you can't get yourself to brush up on basic programming and write some for loops then companies will simply move on to someone who will.

I am good at passing these interviews and am at a faang (will be moving to another one this month). These interviews are useless and provide a false signal on problem solving skills and people's abilities to learn things. The interviews specifically don't test whether or not somebody can roll up their sleeves and jump into code, because if it did why do I as a new hire have to explain so much about software engineering and debugging practices to people who have been here so long?

If you've actually worked at a large company, you'd know that 90% of the real work is done by like 5% of people (maybe even less). If the interviews worked this ratio would be so much better.

what do you think would be a better test?

I have mentioned this before. The best interview I had as a candidate was - they gave me access to their codebase, explained an actual relatively small bug, asked me to fix it and left me alone (I was seated among their devs, they were minding their business, I was minding my own). I think it took me half hour or so (can't remember the exact time, it was a few years ago). I fixed it, they asked me to explain how I found the bug/fixed, they made an offer.

No talking (other than me showing them how I fixed it). No bullshit questions like "where do you see yourself in 5 years" or "talk to us about your strengths" etc.

Second best - they asked me to design and write pseudo code for a simple system. Don't worry about syntax, but make sure to follow good design practices, within reason. Gave me a pen and notepad and left me alone for an hour. I wrote it, explained my thought process, they made an offer.

Then I had shitty interviews - one very large, very famous insurance company - they had 5 rounds of interviews back to back, for a normal developer role, lol. Asked me about some obscure options for grep etc. It was an exercise in them showing off their skills (more like their memory of Linux commands) than learning about my skillset. I couldn't wait to get the hell out of that building.

Of course interviews can't be light when you are hiring for highly technical, high critical positions (like security, for example). But for most software dev positions, the formats above are very efficient. Most software devs are writing "glue" code, not rewriting some mission critical real time OS.