[Bartweiss]

The whole issue is a really weird mixed bag, where good interviewers struggle to weed out awful candidates without harassing strong ones.

"What is threading" actually doesn't bother me, because it's shockingly easy to find experienced backend devs who have no idea - even when they've used MapReduce!

The file I/O one is far more obnoxious, because low-level file interactions are so rarely a good idea in most languages. In general, the right way to handle that remains "scripting" right up until it becomes "framework". And if someone expects that file I/O as part of a larger problem, they should probably accept anything sensible-looking or offer you a couple of method names like "getTextLine" to avoid the whole issue.

The whole process is broken, certainly, but its broken on both ends.

[throwawaysbdif]

It definitely is broken. If I had to point it to a specific cause, I would say the main problem is that the industry is overrun with charlatans. The reason appears to be, when comparing CS to other professions, that so many schools do a poor job teaching CS. Also a factor is that tech jobs are so hot that everyone and their cousins wants pie in the sky dev money without putting in the effort to go to school or self teach. In basically every other engineering profession, a degree is your boarding pass. Not so in CS. I've met guys myself with masters that have no idea what they're doing. Mostly from private school but some public universities too. This in controversial but I think bootcamps are just going to make the situation far worse, if they haven't already. You can't teach everything in a few months so they concentrate on teaching people the skills they need to pass interviews. The real solution to this is to raise the standards in school for CS. The end result would be better interviews for people with degrees, and a clear path through school that leads to an almost guaranteed coding job. This is how it works for every other engineering job.

I've been the guy to screen candidates before and the number of unqualified applicants is astounding. Like, barely more qualified than a random sample of the population. This is for a junior position that simply lists c#,MVC, 1 yr exp. Like a paragraph long job description with 3 requirements. Also listed that we would take Java exp with Jersey or spring boot instead. Over 80% of our applicants didn't meet those requirements. A good portion ~40% had never been to school or written code in their life.

Of the remaining 20%, we would call and ask basic questions relevant to the stack. Just to make sure they're not lying basically. Like for c#, I would ask "what is nuget?" Type questions. Same with maven type stuff for Java guys.

50% of remainder fail multiple questions that anyone who wrote a single app in that stack would know. We now have 10 people out of the 100 that applied.

Half of those aren't local, or lied about being local. 5 people. 2 of them didn't disclose that they need visa sponsorship. We pick 1-2 of the last three.

Rinse and repeat nearly that exact process every time we need to hire anyone. Finding people with experience was even more daunting.