The tech interview still doesn’t fall into parent posters categories of “able to generate viable products” or “skills to build useful things” either.

Not too often tbh. You either get dogshit LeetCode or, more often, just a general chat about what you've done and know. There, social skills play a massive role. Make simple projects sound like state-of-the-art, present everything cool that happened as something you were directly involved in, present the 2 most obscure bugs in the project as something you fixed every other Tuesday when you get bored...

Social skills are not a substitute for technical skills, but they are still important. You have to work with people.

> Yeah, no. You have to pass tech interviews and generally know your shit

You don't understand. You need to meet the hard skills bar, but there are far more bars than the hard skills one.

I think a hefty share of people here fail to understand the fact that there is way more to hiring a candidate than leetcode.