It's well understood that programming interviews are a pretty shitty tool. They're a proxy for understanding if you have basic skills required to understand a computer. Notably, most companies don't rely on these alone, they have behavioral questions, architecture questions, etc. Have you ever done an interview at these companies you're talking about? They're 8 hours lol maybe 1 is spent programming.

But it's just very obvious to any software engineer worth anything that code is just one part of the job, and it's usually somewhere in the middle of a process. Understanding customer requirements, making technical decisions, maintaining the codebase, reviewing code changes/ providing feedback, responding on incidents, deciding what work to do or not to do, deciding when a constraint has to be broken, etc. There are a billion things that aren't "typing code" that an engineer does every day. To deny this is absurd to anyone who lives every day doing those things.

> Is that why most prestigious jobs grilled you like a devil on algos/system design?

No. That’s because interviews have always sucked, and have always been terrible predictors of how you do on the job. We just never had a better way of deciding except paying for a project.

> That’s just nonsense. It’s like saying “delivering product was always the most important thing, not drinking water”.

That’s… not an argument? It’s not even a strawman, it’s just unrelated.

The thing a customer has always paid for was the end product. Not the code. This is absolutely trivial to see, since a customer has never asked to read the code.