[tidepod12]

Yea, but I also think it's more complicated than that. I would think that if you already work for a FAANG or other well-respected tech company, that would de facto serve as your "professional certification" and help avoid these ridiculous interview processes. If you work at Google as a SWE, then you've already passed a pretty high bar to become a SWE and when you apply somewhere else, ideally they would see you can pass that bar and not ask you to leetcode your way over the bar again. But IME, that's not the case. I know some FAANGs that, even when doing an internal transfer within the company, still require you to go through the full leetcode interview process.

There seems to be some kind of inherent or cultural distrust amongst tech interviewing, where nobody trusts that anyone has tech skills unless they personally verify it. I don't think a professional exam/certification would solve this distrust.

[jasonpeacock]

Back in the day I remember stories about candidates who would get an offer from Amazon and then Google/MS would just automatically counter-offer without interviewing as it was assumed that if they passed the Amazon interview then it was good enough for Google/MS.

Or maybe that was just an urban legend...

[jjav]

> you've already passed a pretty high bar to become a SWE

The problem with the algorithm/leetcode style is that you can run it at a very high bar and you end up selecting people extremely skilled at that one thing, but which has very little to none correlation with shipping reliable & maintainable production code.

I've never needed to hire (and surely never will) people who can reverse binary trees with a hand tied behind their back, so that style of interview is not a meaningful signal.

[ThrowawayR2]

> "I would think that if you already work for a FAANG or other well-respected tech company, that would de facto serve as your "professional certification" and help avoid these ridiculous interview processes"

Nope, not at all. Despite their rigorous hiring process, even the FAANGs have bad hires, burn outs, or people who simply can't keep up with the pace. Some FAANGs require an interview loop even for internal transfers to guard against a bad hire.

[ryandrake]

I highly doubt there are even a few software firms who would offer you a job sight unseen purely because you have a prestigious company on your resume. It might help you get your resume to the top of the stack but you’ll still unfortunately be leetcode grinding and whiteboard hazing.