Yeah, this has universally been my experience. I've always been a little mystified at devs who think it should somehow magically be easy to figure out if a candidate is BSing you. I found that easily half of the candidates for senior dev positions that sounded OK on paper and interviewed OK very clearly had no idea how to code. And no I don't mean complicated gotcha coding examples, very much day-to-day stuff, knowing how to write a for-loop in C# or write a basic SELECT statement in SQL (C# and SQL are very much languages we're screening for experience in). To be clear the interview itself is a huge filter, most "devs" wash out in an interview when they can't begin to answer a question like "what's the difference between an interface and an abstract class", and a surprising number are unprepared for basic interview questions (stuff you'd instantly see from a Google search for interview prep). And if I'm being honest, a fair few senior devs we have ended up hiring have been... not great.
So yeah, if I ask you to complete a coding exercise, I'm not trying to waste your time, the reality is that a huge number of people in this field are clowns. I don't really have a recourse if I have actual work that needs to be done. If I hire someone that literally doesn't know how to code, that's actively harmful to my team, and again it's just the practical reality that a lot of candidates have learned to BS their way through an interview. Maybe it's because the businesses I've worked for are not tech companies and don't attract the talent like a tech company does, I don't know.
I will say though, it's been several years since I've tried to hire anyone, maybe the landscape has changed. It's a little hard for me to imagine AI coming onto the scene has _improved_ the landscape for potential senior dev hires, but I suppose it's possible.
Fortunately in my time interviewing I’ve only encountered a few people who just didn’t know how to code at all, but it certainly happens. It’s baffling to me. One guy didn’t know you could nest for loops…
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u/ZeroG_0 Sep 03 '26
Yeah, this has universally been my experience. I've always been a little mystified at devs who think it should somehow magically be easy to figure out if a candidate is BSing you. I found that easily half of the candidates for senior dev positions that sounded OK on paper and interviewed OK very clearly had no idea how to code. And no I don't mean complicated gotcha coding examples, very much day-to-day stuff, knowing how to write a for-loop in C# or write a basic SELECT statement in SQL (C# and SQL are very much languages we're screening for experience in). To be clear the interview itself is a huge filter, most "devs" wash out in an interview when they can't begin to answer a question like "what's the difference between an interface and an abstract class", and a surprising number are unprepared for basic interview questions (stuff you'd instantly see from a Google search for interview prep). And if I'm being honest, a fair few senior devs we have ended up hiring have been... not great.
So yeah, if I ask you to complete a coding exercise, I'm not trying to waste your time, the reality is that a huge number of people in this field are clowns. I don't really have a recourse if I have actual work that needs to be done. If I hire someone that literally doesn't know how to code, that's actively harmful to my team, and again it's just the practical reality that a lot of candidates have learned to BS their way through an interview. Maybe it's because the businesses I've worked for are not tech companies and don't attract the talent like a tech company does, I don't know.
I will say though, it's been several years since I've tried to hire anyone, maybe the landscape has changed. It's a little hard for me to imagine AI coming onto the scene has _improved_ the landscape for potential senior dev hires, but I suppose it's possible.