Most tech interviews are terrible because they’re optimised to make the interviewer feel smarter than the candidate. A game of “gotcha” rather than true matchmaking.
People generally aren’t comfortable hiring people smarter than they are, so they fall into imposter syndrome mentality and try to make themselves look clever. This is why we have so many awful whiteboard coding questions that the interviewer googled an hour before the interview and still doesn’t really understand.
Filtering out the clueless mainly takes a lot of experience, but I can guarantee you’re losing a lot of solid builders and problem solvers upfront to poor interviews.
The only way to improve interviews is to do more of them, which isn’t going to happen if you’re not hiring or being hired. Instead, chat to strangers or colleagues, ask them what hard problems they’ve solved, ask them about their favourite tech, and get better at interviewing through asking good questions and being supportive. And trust me, you’ll find people happy to chat and maybe they’ll even realise it’s helping them practice for their next interview.
The best interviewers are just great conversationalists who know how to listen.