There was a major industry change in technical interviewing practices after Google hit it big. They very publicly optimized their process to minimize false positives even at the expense of a high rate of false negatives. This included live coding and "brain teaser" type questions. Google was then wildly successful and so people in the industry assumed that their interviewing process was one of the reasons why. So a lot of other tech companies superficially copied the Google process in a "cargo cult" approach.
And I'm not claiming that the old Google approach was necessarily wrong or bad (I understand their current process has significantly changed but don't know the details). As an industry we still haven't figured out what the best practice should be. Everyone is still guessing. Every company seems to think they have an excellent hiring process but there are no real controlled experiments or hard data in that area. Who knows?
And I'm not claiming that the old Google approach was necessarily wrong or bad (I understand their current process has significantly changed but don't know the details). As an industry we still haven't figured out what the best practice should be. Everyone is still guessing. Every company seems to think they have an excellent hiring process but there are no real controlled experiments or hard data in that area. Who knows?