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Interviewing has always been a big can of worms in the software industry. For years, big tech has gone with the LeetCode style questions mixed with a few behavioural and system design rounds. Before that, it was brainteasers.Before Google, AFAIK, it was ad hoc, among good programmers. I only ever saw people talking with people about what they'd worked on, and about the company.
(And I heard that Microsoft sometimes did massive-ego interviews early on, but fortunately most smart people didn't mimic that.)
Keep in mind, though, that was was before programming was a big-money career. So you had people who were really enthusiastic, and people for whom it was just a decent office job. People who wanted to make lots of money went into medicine, law, or financial.
As soon as the big-money careers were on for software, and word got out about how Google (founded by people with no prior industry experience) interviewed... we got undergrads prepping for interviews. Which was a new thing, and my impression is that the only people who would need to prep for interviews either weren't good, or were some kind of scammer. But then eventually those students, who had no awareness of anything else, thought that that this was normal, and now so many companies just blindly do it.
If we could just make some other profession be easier big money, maybe only people who are genuinely enthusiastic would be interviewing. And we could interview like adults, instead of like teenagers pledging a frat.