But honestly, does anyone here have experience with doing this kind of interviewing at scale, for experienced software engineering roles? I've been in the industry for coming up on a couple decades, and I have been involved in doing lots of interviews at times, and in that whole period of time, at every company where I've worked, we did the standard multi-round whiteboard / coderpad interviews. Do other folks here actually have recent experience "hiring at scale" in this industry, with a process focused on candidates' experience? Who is doing that?

And also, the question is not "are there ever false positives?" or even "is this biased toward a certain kind of false positive?". Nobody thinks any way of hiring is perfect. Even ignoring bullshit artists, sometimes very competent people just aren't a good fit for the actual demands of a particular job. The question is one of tradeoffs. Are the failure modes and biases of a particular process worse than those of another one?

To me, the current standard process comes at an enormous cost. At any job I've ever had, every time I think that maybe my time there has run its course, I immediately think, ugh, but I'll have to go through the f**ing interview process. I'm not a person who does research on this, so I don't have data or anything, but I must not be alone in this, and I think it is likely a meaningful friction in the job market. (Which, I guess is good for employers, so it probably makes sense that they like the status quo!)

That our industry is so bespoke and different and non-standard around tech stack organization and work culture between shops that in fact someone could have been performing top tier at their previous jobs and just completely not function in your workplace.

And because we have a recency and confirmation bias around your own positions, we treat their failure to thrive in our environment as evidence of incompetence.

When it's just really a bad fit -- one you can't really shake out in a verbal conversation or a whiteboard coding exercise.

Or there could even be something wrong with the way our own workplace is organized. One that we're used to working around, but the new hire is not.

There's so much broken everywhere I've worked. When I see a misfit I generally assume it's a combination of factors, not a person lying or being incompetent (though yes, I've seen that, too)