Why Technical Interviews in India Are Broken

The System Is Testing the Wrong Things

In 2026, the standard technical interview process at most Indian tech companies looks roughly like this: an initial online assessment with DSA problems, a phone screen with more DSA or basic conceptual questions, a technical round with a harder DSA or system design problem, and a final round with a hiring manager or senior engineer.

Most of the companies running this process are not building algorithms. They are building web applications, mobile apps, internal tools, data pipelines, and SaaS products. Their developers spend their working hours reading existing code, debugging integration issues, writing APIs, reviewing pull requests, and shipping features. Nobody is implementing a red-black tree from scratch.

The interview tests skills the job does not require and completely ignores skills the job does require. This is not an accident or an oversight. It is the result of a hiring process that was designed to be scalable and defensible, not accurate.

Understanding exactly what is broken is the first step to understanding why the current system keeps producing bad outcomes for both developers and companies.

Problem One: LeetCode Tests Preparation, Not Engineering

The DSA round has become the defining feature of Indian tech hiring. It was popularized by FAANG companies who used algorithmic problem-solving as a proxy for general engineering aptitude. The logic was: if someone can think clearly about algorithms and optimize for time and space complexity, they probably think clearly about engineering problems in general.

There is some truth to this at the extremes. A developer who cannot implement basic data structures or reason about algorithmic complexity has a gap that will show up on the job. But the DSA round as currently practiced in India has drifted far from that original purpose.

The typical LeetCode medium or hard problem tests one thing above all else: familiarity with LeetCode. If you have seen a problem pattern before, you can solve it. If you have not, you often cannot, regardless of your underlying engineering ability. This means the DSA round primarily sorts candidates by how much time they have spent on LeetCode, not by how good they are at engineering.

A developer who has spent three months grinding LeetCode will consistently outperform a more experienced, more productive engineer who has been shipping production code and had no time for interview prep. The filter is measuring study habits, not engineering skill.

Problem Two: The Questions Are Disconnected From the Job

Ask yourself: when was the last time you implemented a graph traversal algorithm in a production codebase without looking it up? When did you last need to write a segment tree from scratch? When did a sliding window problem come up in a real feature request?

For almost every product engineering role in India, the answer is never. The work is reading documentation, debugging APIs, designing database schemas, writing maintainable code, handling edge cases in business logic, and collaborating with a team to ship things. The DSA round tests none of this.

The deeper problem is that companies use DSA rounds not because they are predictive but because they are easy to grade. A LeetCode problem has a correct answer and a runtime. You pass or fail. The interview requires less skill to administer than a practical round that evaluates real engineering judgment. The convenience of the format drove its adoption far beyond the companies where it was originally appropriate.

Problem Three: Confidence Bias Pervades Every Round

Even setting aside the DSA problem, technical interviews in India have a severe confidence bias.

Verbal communication during a coding problem is treated as signal for technical ability. A developer who talks through their approach clearly and confidently while coding passes more often than a developer who codes more carefully but communicates less fluently during the process. These are different skills. One is about how you perform under the artificial pressure of a timed interview. The other is about how well you actually engineer.

Interviewers consistently rate candidates with confident presentation higher even when the technical output is equivalent or worse. This is not a conscious bias in most cases. Confident delivery genuinely feels like competence. It is very hard to separate in real time.

The result is that the technical interview filters for a combination of DSA preparation and extroverted communication style under pressure. Developers who are methodical, less vocal, or simply anxious in formal settings underperform the interview systematically, even when they are stronger engineers.

Problem Four: Six Rounds for No Reason

The number of interview rounds at Indian tech companies has increased significantly over the last several years. It is now common to see processes with four to seven rounds stretching over three to six weeks before a decision is made.

This benefits nobody. From the candidate's perspective, it is an enormous time investment before they know whether they have the job. Many candidates in active job searches are interviewing at multiple companies simultaneously. Longer processes mean more candidates drop out partway through when they receive another offer.

From the company's perspective, long processes create the illusion of rigor without delivering it. Adding a fifth round of interviews does not meaningfully improve hiring outcomes if all five rounds are testing the same things. The signal saturates very early. Additional rounds primarily add cost and attrition.

The length also creates a false equivalence between effort and quality. A company that runs seven rounds feels like it is being very selective. But if those seven rounds are all variations of the same DSA and system design evaluation, the process is wide, not deep.

Problem Five: No Feedback, No Calibration

Most Indian tech companies do not give candidates feedback after rejection. The candidate spent ten hours across multiple interviews, invested weeks of preparation time, and receives "we have decided to move forward with other candidates."

This is bad for candidates who cannot learn what to improve. It is also bad for companies that cannot learn whether their interview process is calibrated correctly.

If you never find out that a candidate you rejected became a strong performer at a competitor, you never know your filter is miscalibrated. If rejected candidates never get feedback, they cannot tell you whether your process felt fair or relevant to them. The process operates in a closed loop with no external signal about whether it is working.

What a Good Technical Interview Should Test

Technical interviews should be predictive of job performance. To do that, they need to test what the job actually requires.

Can they read an unfamiliar codebase and understand what it does? Most of the engineering work at product companies involves existing systems, not greenfield builds. Testing code comprehension is more predictive than testing algorithmic invention.

Can they debug a realistic problem? Give them a broken service and watch how they diagnose it. Systematic debugging under realistic conditions is a core engineering skill that the DSA round completely ignores.

Can they make reasonable architectural decisions? Not "design Twitter" but "we need to add this feature to our existing system, what approach do you recommend and why?" Real architectural judgment with real constraints.

Can they write code that other developers would want to maintain? Code quality, naming, structure, and testability are things that matter every single day on the job and are invisible in a typical technical interview.

How Verified Hiring Fixes the First Round

The first round is where the DSA problem does the most damage. It filters out developers based on LeetCode preparation and lets through developers who are good at interview prep but average at real engineering.

Proovn replaces the first round with a proctored AI-graded assessment that tests real engineering skill in the candidate's domain. The assessment is not a DSA grind. It tests practical ability: building things, reasoning about systems, applying knowledge to realistic problems. The result is a verified skill tier that tells an employer more about a developer's actual capability than three rounds of LeetCode problems.

Employers on Proovn skip the initial DSA screen for verified candidates entirely. They go straight to the rounds that actually predict job performance. The broken round is removed, and the process gets shorter and more accurate at the same time.

For developers, verification means getting past a filter that was never actually measuring your ability. A Silver or Gold tier on Proovn is proof that you can do the work, presented in a form the employer can trust without administering their own screen.

What Needs to Change

Companies need to audit what their interview process is actually measuring and ask honestly whether those things predict job performance at their company. Most of the time, the honest answer is "not as much as we think."

Practical rounds should replace or significantly reduce DSA rounds for most product engineering roles. Feedback should be given after rejections. Interview processes longer than three substantive rounds should be examined for redundancy.

And the first filter, the one that determines whether a developer ever gets in front of a human interviewer at all, should be a real skill assessment rather than a LeetCode screen.

Join Proovn as a developer and get past the broken first round with verified skill proof that actually reflects what you can build.