What does it mean to be an engineer, laid off. It means I am studying algorithm challenges to get a job I have been doing for 20+ years. I will do it because that is the tacit agreement we all have made. To torture our fellows in the name of "not letting unqualified people in", so that we can feel deserved of those big checks.
--You can't virtual whiteboard a dp solution to my lss problem with contrived memory constraints? Sorry I just can't take the risk of letting you write code on my team. Excuse me while I go back to copying and pasting stack overflow into my oauth library I'm rolling for scratch for some reason.--
We have all seen the coder who talked a good game and nested 10 loops deep and bragged about how much work their code was doing. But apparently detecting them is impossible without puzzles in high stress environments.
Being laid off means I have to stare you in the face knowing full well I have more experience and make better decisions than you in most practical situations, but you will turn me away because I didn't catch your gotcha question where you cleverly described a scenario that could be solved using a single server. But instead I designed a system to scale to several thousand tps quickly, and forgot to ask scale requirements because this is the third architecture interview today and all have been aimed at the scale of your org.
Being laid off means that I am suddenly responsible for adding interview puzzles to my skillset after spending 11 months saving my company millions of dollars writing real software.
I have learned all my skills on the job. Truth is I will do better if you put me in a room with better people. If you measured the ability to develop expertise rapidly you would see that I'm unparalleled, if I may. But you want me to tower of hannoi your fizzbuzz.
I'm gonna go play animal crossing and see if I can forget writing this post. I need to start doing leetcode questions in the morning.
