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I never ask, few exceptions aside, any challenges from the developers I interview.

When hiring 40+ people for a neo-bank, I did what you should have experienced: listen to people and get to know them.

The key point of success in a team is of course their skill set, but also the potential synergy.

Lots of developers are very bad if not terrible at presenting themselves, be it on a résumé or during an interview. And this has no relation to their actual skills.

So I always try as hard as I can to actually extract information from them.

First, I let them feel at ease, telling them that this is not a challenge but a time to get to know each other (which is actually true).

Then I ask a lot of questions about their experience, both in the technical sense, but also human one.

I try as much as possible to understand how they think and feel, what do they value, aspire to, try to achieve by joining the company.

I’m not a hiring manager but a 15+ yrs of experience developer. Yet, I find that hiring developers by actually being one goes much smoother than when you’re not.

Last but not least, I think that this crazed interviews are becoming more and more common practice because developers agree to pass them.

If you want to change this, then don’t go through them. There are thousands of other great companies that do no torture their candidates.