I actually like tech interviews specifically because it's hard to BS your way through them.
I've definitely seen smooth talkers with great resumes get through any other filter, but I've never seen a false positive with the technical interview.
It's not that you can BS your way through a tech interview, but that the skillset required to do well in a tech interview is different than the one you need to be good at a developer job.
I've seen way more than a few false positives from tech interviews, along with tremendous amounts of false negatives: People with backgrounds of being transformative to teams and organizations that just couldn't look good enough while solving random algorithm problems to save their lives.
It's just hard to see the kinds of things a company misses when they keep insisting in asking people about graph algorithms and implementing red black trees, because those same companies just never get to see the kind of people that you get when you do things differently.
I currently work for a company that does relatively traditional tech interviews and does 95% of sourcing from big schools and ver well known tech companies. I fail to see a major difference between my coworkers here vs my coworkers at places where your average dev went to a midwest state school and was never asked an algorithm question during interview.
I've seen people who can whip up a nice solution to an interview problem but can't plan out a larger system. Or they have some cool way of solving the interview but then it turns out they want to write 100% of their code as monkey-patches. Or they write great code but cannot get along with anyone. Or they can solve the interview but don't actually have the deeper expertise that they said they did. I'd call all of those false positives from the technical interview.
I guess you could counter that you need to have a 10x longer technical interview that covers all these aspects, but a long interview process is going to filter out all the candidates who are good enough not to have to put up with one.
This is why I wish system design questions were more common. I couldn't care less if you can do a bunch of palindrome algorithm problems on a white board. I do care if you understand the scalability, maintainability, and implications of your code. And if you understand how different data structures work and are used. Most whiteboard problems fail spectacularly at this.
I agree that, in principle, system design interviews are great. The problem is that, in practice, I have seen them generate way too many false positives. This was at great companies and with people who had absolutely stunning resumes.
Ah, but the problem with technical interviews isn't the false positives, it's the false negatives -- introverts, people who are inexperienced with whiteboards, people who think it's silly to memorize BFS and DFS when they could look them up, women, people of color.
False positives are way more expensive than false positives. Any filter that is not heavily biased towards false negatives over false positives would likely be terrible for the business goals of interviewing. That is a baseline fact.
I am not sure why you think women and people of color are extra bad at whiteboard problems. In my experience the applicant pool for technical and engineering fields is heavily biased towards white, asian and Indian males, but that happens way before the stage of the whiteboard interview.
The guys/gals that can express themselves without anxiety are, more generally, going to make a better impression. Those with social anxiety or those with less social skills than those "extroverts" will, more generally, make worse impressions.
Any interview/test/discussion without overwhelming objectivity will be subjective by nature and therefore subject to emotional bias.
