i can't believe all of the replies to this thread. us nerds get a bit too myopic about
the details and fail to see the forest for the trees. let's zoom back and look at the Earth from the Moon.

what other industry has hiring rituals premised on assuming The Candidate is a shape shifting imposter and then testing The Candidate using various Gom Jabbars to verify The Candidate is a human who can code? do attorneys and doctors and professors device elaborate exams and gotcha questions to spring upon The Candidate because The Candidate might be a total fraud? to be honest, this implicit assumption that The Candidate is an outright liar and con-man and that we have to "catch" them in their lies before we let them into The Club has been an enormous turn off for me in this entire industry. and i'm saying that both as The Senior Engineer put in charge of hiring developers as well as being The Candidate dozens of times and having to go through multiple Voight-Kampf tests to prove "yes, i can code."

why don't attorneys and doctors have the same problems we do? they pay more, so the incentives are there for The Candidate to rote memorize a bunch of text books and talk impressively while being unable to perform The Work themselves. is the problem that anyone can call themselves a Software Engineer and there is no way to prove it? is the problem inherent to the nature of software itself, in that the problems we solve and the solutions we apply are constantly changing ephemeral logical abstractions which cannot be repeated because every context has a totally different set of constraints, so it always reduces to Apples vs Oranges? is the problem inherent to the nature of Nerds and Autists and the personality types who tend to become software engineers? is being a Coder the Nerd's version of The Jock's hazing rituals? are we Nerds just as big of bullies and assholes as The Jocks, bullying our own and shaming each other against meaningless goal posts? we often hear now about how our Industry lacks "diversity" and how we need to be more "inclusive" to women and blacks. well how do you think women and black people feel about our bizarre and harsh hiring rituals of hazing and shaming and accusing of being The Imposter and your Interview test is to prove to us that you are not? i think we as an industry need to tone down our bullying hiring rituals if we hope to ever stop being an elite club of oppressors.

just last week i got rejected as The Candidate because i didn't have 10 years of React experience. "sorry, you're not senior enough", even though i had twice the number of years of raw dev experience than the punk kid over ten years younger than me who was in charge of hiring. i have seen this happen to me a dozen times, where i am rejected because i know too much about a Domain, and can go into gory technical detail about internals and implementations, which intimidates The Juniors who know one Javascript framework and think they are Seniors and who don't want a Real Senior around who might take their promotion slot away from them.

i don't even think in terms of "Junior" and "Senior" anymore. those are not useful buckets to divide the vast world of software development. instead, i think in terms of "what rad shit have you coded and what gets you excited about code and what kinds of things do you wish you could code or what do you code for fun on nights and weekends?" sadly, the vast majority of "professional coders" draw a blank at that question and they have zero answer, because for them coding is just a job. they never even knew it was For The Love of the Game. general interest and curiosity seems to be a better litmus test, because "interest is aptitude", and if you're the kind of brain who takes things apart for fun to figure out how they work and then try to put the system back together, then that proves you're a left-brain thinking INT(J/P) type of mind who is naturally suited for software engineering. the rest can be taught or learned on The Job as needed to fill in the gaps.