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Another problem nobody wants to publicly acknowledge is that unlike in law, medicine or even classical engineering, everyone can call himself a Software Engineer!

So you end up with 6 month coding bootcamp "graduates" claiming to be "engineers" alongside folks who graduated from long and hard engineering programs (MIT MEng comes to mind) and who had to complete things like this [0] as assignments.

I recall someone from a bootcamp writing a cascade of nested if-else statement, 6 level deep in some places. Then someone with a real CS background told him that he was basically building a finite state machine, to which the other dev responded that “he didn’t need fancy thing, just for the function to work”.

That's the main reason companies use algorithmic questions when filtering out candidates (because it checks for an understanding of the fundamentals, something bootcamp grads will lack and that will take years to acquire) and why every job interview has questions like these (there's no certification process, anyone can claim the title, so the company must do the vetting every time).

[0] https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/academic/class/15213-f10/www/l...