People out there who can’t code interviewing for SWE roles, I can’t speak to, but there are definitely folks being asked to be fluent in code for non SWE roles who aren’t SWEs, so it makes sense everyone gets put through the leetcode grinder rubric to calibrate their level. I don’t think this is about misrepresentation, but expectation misalignment and a crude tool being necessary to evaluate human skills against a baseline.
(nearing 40, 22 years in tech, getting out asap, ymmv)
I’m a staff engineer and tech lead at a MANGA company. I code in up to 5 languages a day. I’ve written Network stacks, compression software, virtualization software, and the backbone of multiple PaaS platforms. And they were focused on whether I knew niche algorithms (apparently based on EXT3) and other stupid stuff.
That's a new one to me, what's it made of?
(All that's coming to mind is I presume totally unrelated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manga )
I interview tons of software engineering candidates (pre pandemic it was at least one or two a week). At least half of my senior candidates fail basic phone screener questions.
These are questions that reflect something they'd be doing day to day in the role, but also are incredibly standard in our field.
The issue in most of them is that they've taken their support network for granted. The tons of developers before them who laid groundwork, and the others currently who take care of many tasks they consider junior.
Well that leaves them in a weird spot where they've not actually done a lot of the foundational work their predecessors set up for them, and they've let a lot of their skills atrophy by delegating to juniors. They'll even say as much and say "oh so and so does that, or they had it set up and it's great"
But then what am I hiring them for? Certainly they're not bringing a wealth of programming ability over, so maybe soft skills? That's hard to hedge bets on for a SWE, maybe as an product manager or something.
Again, at least half of software engineers I talk to for the screening round are not strong developers for the reasons I mentioned above.
At my last company, I joined as their lead developer and discovered they already had another developer in the pipeline they were thinking of hiring. They thought the guy was super senior, and when I read his CV sure enough he came across that way. He emphasized on his CV that he was not only a Java expert but an expert on the internals of HotSpot itself.
Probably he'd been saying that for years, and given how many firms use the JVM it's probably a great line. Unlucky for him he got an interviewer (me) who actually was an expert in the HotSpot internals and liked to relax by reading its source code. Guess what? He knew nothing about the JVM, not even stuff you'd learn by reading the user guide. I got the sense he'd read one or two popular press articles about it 20 years ago, put it on his CV and never updated it.
So we progress to some coding. He can't code. He struggles with even the basics of starting a new program in an editor and compiling it.
The guy was demanding a huuuge salary and great perks. After I wrote up what I'd found from the coding interview he was quietly dropped from the pipeline. They'd been about to accept because they were so dazzled by his claims but weren't checking them.
The "knew it once maybe sorta" problem is common, especially with C++ where lots of people were struggling with it in the 90s and then jumped to Java/C# as soon as they came out. But they still list C++ on their CV. Ask them to write a C++ program (that does anything at all) and they'll just refuse or state point blank they'd feel really uncomfortable doing that.
Lots of people lie about their experience unfortunately. They probably don't think of it as lying. They just write down every possible thing they've ever thought or read about and exaggerate, gambling that they'll never be called on it. And, they're probably right. That's why coding interviews took off.
Well, job postings are infamous for listing a ridiculous number of "requirements" that aren't really requirements. Those who are familiar with hiring know that job postings themselves are lies and encourage people to ignore the requirements and apply anyway. Even the people who work for the hiring company say this! So it's a two-way street. There are already perverse incentives created by the hiring companies. And we also know that resumes are screened for specific buzzwords. You may not be recruited or interviewed unless unless your resume has the right buzzwords.
I did a bunch of really quick 15~20 min pre-interviews to check if the person was entering the right process before we both wasted hours of our time. Some who were supposed to have coded and deployed whole applications didn’t know how their versioning system worked. Or they reviewed PR/MRs a lot and tweaked a few lines here and there but had little practical knowledge of issues you’d regularly hit when developing, and only heard of popular tools and resources by name.
We could still had them onboard and give them time to get up to speed, but it’s harder to do when they weren’t upfront about it and you’re there trying to guess what else they’re bulshitting on their resume.
there are a lot of them
