Sorry but this is simply not true. After a while we decided to do exactly the thing that the article describes as our preliminary interviewing process at Amazon. We also had extensive onsite interviews, however we did not ask candidates to code at the whiteboard. Btw, when you work for such companies it is expected that you spend 10% of your time on hiring. Getting hiring right is one of the most important things that you need to do at the scale of Amazon, Google and all of these large companies. Having a single bad hire can bring down the performance of an entire team.
I'm curious if you have any statistics about the different interview styles/processes. Obviously it's hard to figure out the false negatives (good engineers you didn't hire) but how about false positives?
Also, is homework assignment now a part of the standard interview process at Amazon or is this just your team/department?
Which is a bummer. When I interviewed at Amazon a few years ago, it was a day of coding on the whiteboard. Turned out I didn't have the Java experience that group wanted, and I'm allergic to pager duty so that was a non-starter for me.
