Day to day, how much code do you think principle and staff engineers write? Senior architects and team leads? The problem is I don't think we, as an engineering discipline and career path, are willing to recognize that the job of being a coder stops being about writing code! Yes there are deadbeats who don't contribute (some of them can code just fine), as there are in every industry, but until you've been in a project that failed because there was no senior architect, someone getting paid a comfortable salary to be the "senior architect" and not write code sounds like a waste of the company's money to the intern.

At the start of a SWE career, I don't think things broken. Study up some leetcode and write code on a whiteboard to prove that you, as a candidate, are smart and motivated enough to play the game. It's after that, that things get out of sync and you get absolutely amazing people who have written world changing software who can't pass your stupid puzzle of a whiteboard interview. And then what do you do? This person failed your test but you want to hire them. Here's the part where we fail, where we are too stuck on following the rules.

They failed the test so you can't make an offer? No. Move heaven and Earth to bend the rules, and make them the offer anyway. Don't hide behind corporate handbooks and the HR or the legal department.

Obviously this power can be abused, but I don't take it as a given that it must be, given a hiring panel.

Google could have made an offer to Homebrew's Max Howell but chose not to, which speaks volumes.