I'm not sure you and OP are talking about the same thing. What you're describing as a a tech interview (as I understand at least) sounds like a delight to me. I enjoy talking tech and am happy to wax poetic on any of those topics. But the tech interviews I've recently done (for web developer positions) have been more focused on com-sci concepts and whiteboarding exercises (sometimes in front of 3-4 people on a video line) on arbitrary things like solving mazes according to special rules or building a donkey kong clone in javascript. Generally nothing that you would do as a web developer. I'm a fairly accomplished developer, but it's easy for me to look stupid in front of even a junior developer when I'm writing code on a whiteboard. I use google a lot while I work (without shame... until I'm at a whiteboard) and I reference other parts of the codebase for context. The best offer I got was from a company that did exactly as OP suggested... gave me a short contract job and evaluated on the code and my interactions during the job. That's also how I've hired developers for my own startups, and the results were excellent... they've all gone on to top-tier companies.