This has been my experience interviewing past couple of months . I have over a decade of fulltime experience. I still had to do tons of these whiteboard/algorithm interviews. And not its not just clueless companies doing them, everyone from google to local software consulting show down the street doing this.

I disagree. I suggest you read about the behavioral interview. By using pretty well known techniques you can quickly get people into a situation where they feel comfortable in telling you about what they did or did not do.

For example, I recently had someone run through a distributed system's set of questions related to kafka and some AWS services. It became obvious through this questioning that what he had built was not capable of guaranteed message delivery, i.e. the system was lossy.

The rest of the interview was about this system and how he would rebuild it to make sure there were no messages lost between all the handoffs of the system. We got into many very detailed areas about persistence, atomicity, idempotentcy, etc.

It should not be a shoot the breeze conversation about buzz words, it should be a very detailed process of getting down to the most complicated piece of software someone has worked with. It becomes very clear, very quickly, if they are bullshitting you, and then you don't hire them.

Sadly this is very true. I had been working with a colleague who was a perfect talker about best practices and what not, and first to criticize the offshore team for bad coding, yet himself he was as well doing a lot of crazy things and sloppy coding, and breaking the build and shipping regressions on a regular basis.

Unfortunately I don't have a good solution to this problem.

I'm wondering how interviews in other professions look like. For example when you're a director of a hospital and want to hire a surgeon. I guess you don't ask him to come one day to make a little surgery for free.

Fizz buzz etc. might detect complete frauds, and at the other end some heavy algorithm questions might falsely reject good candidates who simply haven't applied that stuff in a long time. I think small at-home coding challenges are a sweet spot. They too reveal total rejects, but allow the rest to demonstrate their broader level of understanding and organization. And they make great follow-up discussion items.