[sickblastoise]

The issue is we don’t actually recognize that there are two very different careers that fall under the “software” umbrella.

One is developing hard software, software that needs to be performant on a hardware level. Like operating systems, low level libraries, embedded software, databases. The ability to quickly identify and apply data structures and algorithms leetcode style is very important in hard software.

The second is soft-software, which needs to be performant on the organizational budget/timeline level. This type of software engineering is more about glueing together hard software in the right way to solve business problems. Leetcode style interviews make no sense here, because the glue is usually bash or Python and it isn’t really doing much besides orchestrating hard software and delegating work to it.

[aguaviva]

And yet it's still not clear that the standard anxiety-driven interview process is in any way helpful for sussing out actual performative ability in the former category.