Comment by gchamonlive

It has to be really clear what's the purpose of the interview. You want to measure how technically competent someone is, but in practice how competent someone is in any organisation has more to do with internal communication and institutional knowledge than technical skills. That means without technical skills it's certainly impossible to be productive, but technical skills by themselves don't mean guaranteed success, not even to lower the uncertainty of failure.

Which is funnily something opensource doesn't suffer from. You just have to prove identity to the commits you signed in previous contributions, so the problem of proving technical skills in the opensource community is replaced by the effort of building trust.

The answer therefore could be to replace technical interviews by sending out assignments to candidates to have them contribute to opensource and come back with results. This has the upside for candidates that if multiple companies do such assignments they only have to contribute once to be eligible for multiple hiring processes.

Everybody wins.