alt Hacker NewsA decade+ is plenty of time to spend a few weeks brushing up on CS basics. There is really only a handful of algorithms and data sctructues and none of them are rocket science.
And what's the alternative? Quizzing people on some random C# framework methods? The "I don't use algos in a day to day job" argument has been around forever, but nobody making it ever proposes a better filter.
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Strong no hire for Staff+ signal from this post.
Meta's leetcode gambit includes leetcode Hards and Mediums which aren't just "remember your hash maps and trees!" They're incredibly hard to brute force under time pressure if you haven't practiced similar problems before. Now do that for every interview -- exhausting.
Alternative? Lol? System design. "Walk me through systems you've built." Have a conversation. If you can't then maybe you don't have the skill for interviewing or dare I say the skill to be an engineer.
The better filter is to spend the precious interview time talking about actual experience solving real work problems, it has a high signal to noise ratio, because it gives you information on many independent axes.
I guess for candidates fresh out of school, you have to fall back to things they should know out of school as a proxy.