How do we know that? Interviewing is near a total crapshoot from what I can tell based on my 13 years of experience (~8 of which being actively involved in the process, 3 as a decision maker.) I have yet to find a method that weeds out people who can whiteboard, but can't deliver, or those who seem to have a great personality and work ethic, but stop showing up to work and/or throw tantrums when they don't get their way.
Obviously some people emit red flags like the Sun emits energy, but I'm I don't believe you can assume it's "working fine" without some baseline definition of "fine" and a corresponding study.
As the sibling comment mentions, companies are able to build large scale systems by engineers who got in through these kind of interviews. I am not saying this is the right way or wrong way, but it definitely works.
Of course when you do this, you miss out on some amazing candidates, but the big companies which started this can afford to do that because of the insane num of applications they get.
A larger problem is the cargo-culting of whiteboard interview techniques by smaller companies who do not get the volume of applicants that FAANG do, get believe they will succeed anyway.
Some are. Some fail to even pull of moderately difficult projects. I didn't mean to say that interviewing is literally a coin flip, but I can dig a trench with a pickaxe. Doesn't mean it's a good way to do it.
Unsatisfactory as the whole hiring process can be, I don't actually believe that throwing a pile of resumes in the air and picking up a handful at random would work as well.
How do we know that? Interviewing is near a total crapshoot from what I can tell based on my 13 years of experience (~8 of which being actively involved in the process, 3 as a decision maker.) I have yet to find a method that weeds out people who can whiteboard, but can't deliver, or those who seem to have a great personality and work ethic, but stop showing up to work and/or throw tantrums when they don't get their way.
Obviously some people emit red flags like the Sun emits energy, but I'm I don't believe you can assume it's "working fine" without some baseline definition of "fine" and a corresponding study.