Maybe you can ask them domain-specific questions more relevant to the actual position you’re hiring them for? System design? Pair programming session? Debug a code sample? Present a solution for a home coding assignment?
Anyway, many companies are outsourcing phone screens now to services such as Karat, where Kiwi contractor engineers provide 24/7 interview availability. Yet those interviews cannot be transferred from company to prospective Karat-using company. So you get the worst of all worlds.
Contracting out interviewing is nuts. IDK how a company can think that the level of validation you get in a coding interview is necessary and also think that it can be outsourced to someone else. They seem completely at odds with each other. I assume they're just cargo culting what other companies do though.
I don't think memorizing trivia is a useful signal for a job, which is what a lot of "domain expertise" looks like in interviews. If you're going to write software and solve problems for a job then you should be able to sit down and solve some medium difficulty coding problems. It's not that hard. Personally I'd much rather do that than a take-home coding assignment.
The number of people out there working as engineers who can't write basic code is too high to not check.
To be fair it’s just the phone screens, but this is the world we’re living in. Eventually someone will build another Triplebyte with AI evaluators and so on and it might actually catch on.
To go back full circle, if you get a decent credentialing system then people who can code can simply pass a test once (let’s say every 5-10 years) and be done with it instead of every single time they interview. DRY!
Anyway, many companies are outsourcing phone screens now to services such as Karat, where Kiwi contractor engineers provide 24/7 interview availability. Yet those interviews cannot be transferred from company to prospective Karat-using company. So you get the worst of all worlds.