If you're still asking trvia, yes. Maybe it's time to shift from the old filter and update the process?
If you can see in the job that a 30 minute PR is the problem, then maybe replace that 3rd leetcode round with 30 minutes of pair programming. Hard to chatGPT in real time without sounding suspicion.
But is the false negative for a nervous pair programmer worse than a false positive for a leetcode question? Ideally a good interviewer would be able to separate the anxiety from the actual thinking and see that this person can actually think, but that's another undervalued skill among industry.
Given how much these orgs pay, both direct to head hunters and indirect in interview time, might as well probationally hire the whoever passes the initial sniff test.
That also lets you evaluate longer term habits like punctuality, irritability, and overall not-being-a-jerkness.
Onboarding. Even with good employees, it can take a few months to get the flow of the organization, understanding the code base, and understanding the domain. Maybe a bit of technology shift too. Firing a person who doesn't appear to be preforming in the first week or two or three would be churning through that too fast.
Provisional hiring with "maybe we'll hire you after you move here and work for us for a month" is a non-starter for many candidates.
At my current job and the job previous it took two or three weeks to get things fully set up. Be it equipment, provisioning permissions, accounts, training (the retail company I worked at from '10 to '14 - they sent every new hire out to a retail store to learn about how the store runs (to get a better idea of how to build things for them and support their processes).
... and not every company pays Big Tech compensation. Sometimes it's "this is the only person who didn't say «I've got an offer with someone else that pays 50% more»". Sometimes a warm body that you can delegate QA testing and pager duty to (rather than software development tasks) is still a warm body.
Most (middle) management is an exercise in ass-covering, rather than creating healthy teams. They get easily scared when "Jira isn't green", and look someone else to blame for not doing the managing part correctly
"Bad" is vague, subjective moralist judgement. It's also easily manipulated and distorted to justify firing competent people who did no wrong.
> It’s pretty obvious when someone starts actually working if they’re going to a net positive. On the order of weeks, not months.
I feel your opinion is rather simplistic and ungrounded. Only the most egregious cases are rendered apparent in a few weeks worth of work. In software engineering positions, you don't have the chance to let your talents shine through in the span of a few weeks. The cases where incompetence is rendered obvious in the span of a few weeks actually spells gross failures in the whole hiring process, which failed to verify that the candidate failed to even meet the hiring bar.
> (...) might as well probationally hire the whoever passes the initial sniff test.
This is a colossal mistake, and one which disrupts a company's operations and the candidates' lives. Moreover, it has a chilling effect on the whole workforce because no one wants to work for a company ran by sociopaths that toy with people's lives and livelihood as if it was nothing.
If you have that kind of office politics going on, that's the issue to be solved.
>toy with people's lives and livelihood as if it was nothing.
If the employee lies about their skills, it is on them.
Real junior hiring used to mean taking someone raw, pairing them heavily for six months, and turning them into a solid mid. Now the default is “we’ll only hire someone who needs zero ramp-up” and then wonder why the market feels empty.