alt Hacker NewsI think some of this is probably attributed to being maintenance devs who don't build a lot of greenfield stuff. I got this way in one of my past jobs. I think us as devs really need to practice creating things from scratch from time to time. Working out those kinks is a good skill (less with AI) but also good practice for those baby components you'd need to make in an interview.
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zeroCalories • yesterday at 8:09 PM
TBH I'm like that, but how hard could writing a React component be? I'm not even a React programmer but I can probably write working code on a whiteboard.
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When I did tech interviews, I used to think I could just jump right in with an intermediate level question and go from there. But the reality is that most of the candidates I interviewed couldn't even answer a trivial question that just required a basic for-loop with an if-statement inside it. These are not pressure-cooker interviews where they need to balance a binary tree while having Baby Shark blasted at them on full volume. These are chill interviews where I ask them to iterate through a string and tell me where the first "x" character is.
There are so many software engineering candidates who literally cannot write the simplest code. I even had someone actually say "I don't really write code at my current job, I'm more of a thought leader." Bzzzzzt.
I've always prepared what I called level 1, level 2, and level 3 questions ready for candidates. But, I almost never even got to level 2, and never in 20 years of interviewing got to my level 3 questions.