I can’t speak to Google in terms of the alpha mentality, but it’s still irresponsible of the world’s most effective computer science company to support it, advertise it with study guides, etc. I expect more self-awareness than that, and less lazy thinking that you need such time constrained trivia to keep an artificial prestige barrier (because it very sincerely is not about detecting engineer effectiveness). Take some responsibility for the cargo cult copycats you are fueling. The same could be said about stack ranking and various other policies as well.

Regarding interviews, everybody’s a comedian. You say GitHub but some of the best engineers I know do not participate in open source projects or are prevented from doing so by their employers. I say just treat software engineering like every other professional field on the planet and just conversationally interview people in a technically detailed way, focus on their past projects, work history, ability to get specific about their work. And of course that would not be as good for people just out of school or who forgot ancient work project details.

I would be fine with a holistic average approach, where each of these different ways is applied, but each counts for little weight individually. So you can be forgiven for a code test flub if you’re sharp on your work experience technical details.

But we exist in a state far away from that... where things are overwhelmingly based on isolated, time-sensitive trivia given 100% of the decision weight.