The interview process has been influenced by FAANG companies. People who want to work for FAANG companies study for their interview and at the same time implement the FAANG interview process in their own companies.

If it's good enough for Amazon or Google, it should be good enough for my company. Right? Absolutely not.

These interviews are geared to avoiding false positives and false negatives is very much acceptable. It cost too much to hire/train/fire and replace a person who turns out to be a mediocre employee. And if you have a false negative, it is very acceptable to fail to hire an actually good candidate. There are tons more people willing to to interview for the company.

However you do NOT have the pipeline like Google or Amazon. You can't afford false negatives as well. It costs the company time and money to keep on interviewing candidates when you just bypass the right one already because your interview process if flawed.

A company without the same resource as the big companies, need to find the "diamond in the rough". Hire the "creative" and experience developers who is by far better than most of your current developers but can't pass the Amazon interview.

Currently there are usually 3-4 tech interviews. The first one technical interview is the one that shows you can code. What does 2nd and 3rd one do? It's also tests if you can really really code. One bad interview and you are done (because again, a bias towards avoiding false positives).

And then there's the system design. It's there because again Google/Amazon does a system design interview. Do interviewers really even know what you are looking for in a system design interview or are they regurgitating the design interview study guides.

The only question that needs to be asked in a technical interview is, can this person do or learn to do the job that they need done every day? (I'm going to guarantee you that there is no recursion algorithm involved.)