That works in a world where everyone is technically competent, but oddly many people applying to software positions are, optimistically, planning to learn on the job. Work with enough folks like that at once and the motivation for the coding interview becomes clear.

Lame? It’s a bare minimum demonstration of ability.

The number of experienced candidates I’ve interviewed just in the past few months who have trouble writing a for-loop in the language they’re “experienced” in might astound you.

Welders sometimes (always?) have to go to a certification center to demonstrate that they can actually perform the types of welds the job they’re applying for requires.

https://www.aws.org/Certification-and-Education/Professional...

You're 100% right, but I think your experience is different than recent job seekers. I think this is mostly semantics. You're asking simple problems and are amazed at the number of people that can't do them.

In the current job market, however, lots of places are asking ridiculously hard verbatim leetcode questions in an attempt to filter out "bad candidates." Job seekers feel that too many places ask unfair questions (which is true) and employers feel that there are too many candidates that can't write genuinely simple programs (also true).

> Interviewing as a process sucks enough as it is.

It truly does, and it sucks just as much for the employer as for the applicants. That's why I suspect that more interviews will be required to be in person: if it's too easy for someone to cheat, that makes everything suck even more for the employer and the employer is likely to adjust the process to minimize that suckage.

> Technical interviews are lame and filter for people that are good at technical interviews, not people that are good at the job.

Not automatically, but yes, bad technical interviews filter for people who are good at technical interviews. And too many interviews (technical or otherwise) are bad.