[jimmywetnips]

And therein lies the problem that's been re-hashed 100s of times here. This biasis against people with families or people who are higher up who don't have time outside their jobs. A lot of friends who were jrs pulled weekend and late nights just cramming leetcode. It worked. But as a sr, who have tons of other things going on, with work and otherwise, there's just not enough time to do it.

The problem I think is that although there's harm done to the company in losing out on good engineers, the cost isn't attributable to individuals in the hiring chain. That cost is difused over time to everyone else and there's no accoutability. The next best alternative, the ones who could jump through the hoops will tend to be just as any other on average.

I think I have a pretty good sense of who the legitimate good vs bad engineers are. I'm always checking up on people we've denied or people I thought were bad but was overruled on. I'm not perfect but I have a better record than the teams in general. But that's because I have a vested interest in making the team good. The hr people, they don't really care since their incentives are just to get people funelling into the roles, and they have so many applicants that they have to rely on ai to auto filter, which is shit at finding real quality.

Good football players train for games, do well in games, and are hireable as long as they do well in their primary activity: playing and winning games. Good engineers CANNOT be hired unless they do training in a totally tangential direction, unless their job is literally algorithms all day working on a kernel team or something.