This got me to wondering what an interview about "the actual practice of writing software" would look like, and having a look at Glassdoor's mechanical engineering interview questions [1] for comparison, it doesn't seem these kinds of questions would elicit much better quality candidates.

I'm increasingly convinced that the apprenticeship program approach would yield far better, deeper results than how we're going about recruiting these days, but most business leadership is fiscally addicted to short-term hire-fire cycles instead of looking for ways to exert more control over their destinies. I suspect that recruiting model is an ingredient to systematized innovation (the "deeper" part I mentioned, which I use to denote internalized concepts, procedures, mental models, etc. necessary to fluent application and craft that I believe are absolute table stakes in innovation).

[1] https://www.glassdoor.com/Interview/mechanical-engineer-inte...