It's because background/experience questions are useless.
Whenever hiring comes on up on reddit or HN I see a lot of posts that can only come from people who haven't been an interviewer much.
First rule of hiring: most of the people you talk to want your money. The candidate is selling themselves to you. They know firing people is hard and there are almost never consequences for misleading interviewers.
What happens when people are asked to talk about their prior projects, experience or really anything that isn't a highly controlled and repeatable coding question?
1. They pass off things they saw or read as their own experience.
2. They claim a team's accomplishments as their own.
3. They massively exaggerate or try to BS you in other ways.
4. They give uselessly vague answers, not necessarily deliberately.
Maybe you don't do these things, but back when I bothered asking these sorts of questions I did encounter such answers pretty frequently.
Companies have converged on live coding because that's something concrete, real and largely un-bullshittable. Yeah, toy programs in interviews aren't "real" programming but it's a lot closer to real than listening to someone ramble in a disorganised way about "their" previous project, and at the end realise you still don't know what that person actually did and what was done by others.
Whenever hiring comes on up on reddit or HN I see a lot of posts that can only come from people who haven't been an interviewer much.
First rule of hiring: most of the people you talk to want your money. The candidate is selling themselves to you. They know firing people is hard and there are almost never consequences for misleading interviewers.
What happens when people are asked to talk about their prior projects, experience or really anything that isn't a highly controlled and repeatable coding question?
1. They pass off things they saw or read as their own experience.
2. They claim a team's accomplishments as their own.
3. They massively exaggerate or try to BS you in other ways.
4. They give uselessly vague answers, not necessarily deliberately.
Maybe you don't do these things, but back when I bothered asking these sorts of questions I did encounter such answers pretty frequently.
Companies have converged on live coding because that's something concrete, real and largely un-bullshittable. Yeah, toy programs in interviews aren't "real" programming but it's a lot closer to real than listening to someone ramble in a disorganised way about "their" previous project, and at the end realise you still don't know what that person actually did and what was done by others.