Anytime there's a blog post or a thread complaining about the 'broken coding interview process' it ends up being upvoted by everyone and their brother on HN but very rarely have I seen people offer a reasonable alternative instead.

I work for a big tech company and for our org, typically we have a couple of Algorithms/Coding rounds, a system design round, a technical communication round and a loosely structured interview/chat with a hiring manager. I think this works because people, at least on my teams, have to work on a wide array of features that could involve writing backend queues, or Hadoop jobs or some business logic on the API layer that would need to leverage caches/DBs/other appropriate key-value stores. It definitely does help to have people who have broader knowledge of Computer Science to be working on those features.

I feel our interviews have low recall and precision but a good accuracy (we end up hiring smart people we can count on to pick new things up). And FWIW I don't think we ask unreasonable questions during the coding rounds. I also feel it's a reasonably scalable way to organize a generic 'objective' and 'fair to all' interviewing process at a big company that can hold a reasonable hiring bar.

If I was running a smaller company then I probably would have kept in place a process that was closer to the bare practical requirements of the job.

Also, if the existing interview process was really that bad in practice with an abysmal correlation with successful hiring, wouldn't the companies have dropped it already?

I know this kind of sucks for applicants who think they have all the skills that are needed to practically do the things they'd have to do at the job they're interviewing for (and in some cases rightly so), but arguments bashing the current interview process would seem more valuable with the proposal for a better alternative that can comes off as reasonable after the same amount of critique and scrutiny that the current process gets.

Also, I often get confused - do people not agree that there's any correlation with hiring good engineers and the current process, or do they just think companies should have a more developer-friendly interview process? If it's the latter, then do the companies have any incentive to do so? It can't be that 'their potential hiring pool becomes wider' because if that really was such a big problem they would have changed already.

(All opinions mentioned here are mine and none are my employer's, obviously)

(Edited comment twice to attempt to make thoughts more coherent)