[potatolicious]

There's a fence here - a bimodality if you will. I've been on both sides of it.

I used to do a large amount of phone screening for Amazon, probably over a hundred in all by the time I got sick of being a professional interviewer. I experienced much of what the author did: the bulk of the candidates had zero algorithms or data structures knowledge and could not program. Not "can't program well" or "can't program at a professional level", we're talking "I don't trust you with a simple shell script".

Now I work for a rather more obscure startup - we're relatively well known in the tech scene around here, but we're by a very long shot not a mainstream household name. The caliber of people that come through the door now is vastly different. I've interviewed some duds here, but have never interviewed someone in this position that just outright couldn't code.

The question I have for the author is who he hires for, and how much they pay. The low end of the software industry is plagued with people who have no business calling themselves programmers. It's really a vicious cycle - there's a large segment of our industry where the typical skill level is disastrously low, which causes ever more bureaucratic and ever more absurd filtering mechanisms to be invented, which further alienates programmers who have any real choice in employers.

Nowadays I'd be mildly insulted if given a FizzBuzz during an interview - but I used to do the same out of necessity, because 25% of my candidates couldn't pass it.