[sokoloff]

I’ve personally experienced devs who could not sum a collection of ints, “in any language of your choice”.

I’m not talking about devs who got hung up on integer overflow issues (or even off-by-one errors), but rather “just couldn’t get started at all”. I have no idea what they did before or what they expected to do if they got the job, but I doubt it would turn out well.

[ryandrake]

Yep, I've seen that too. I start with "sum an array of ints" due to the known problems using fizzbuzz, and there are software engineer candidates who can't or won't do it. Nobody believes you until they see a candidate like this themselves.

My pet theory: A lot of companies are very, VERY big, and a clever person who doesn't know how to do their job but can identify a weak manager, can simply get lost in them. Hiding away getting the paycheck, but doing nothing except convincing their manager they're doing things. I've definitely met a few people in my career that I believe were doing exactly that.

[strken]

Yeah, I've seen that too, even in pre-LLM times.

I don't have a good explanation for how candidates with zero ability to write code can make it through a hiring funnel to sit in front of you. Maybe they don't know what they don't know.