For perspective, applying for a coding job 30 years ago used to involve ONE phone interview that lasted no more than an hour, followed within a week by an in-person visit at the site. In contrast today's insanely laborious interview process sounds like undergoing the Spanish Inquisition.
Before the rise of FAANGs, the interview visit consumed between 1-2 hours (if it was a car drive away) and no more than one day (if a plane ride) with absolutely no homework. In-person, you talked to between 3 and 8 people. At most onerous, the discussion might involve a little pseudocode or drawing diagrams on a white board to show you possessed the skills most prized back then -- fluency in design concepts, the ability to focus and reason well, to communicate ably, and to think on your feet. Syntax skills were presumed given that you had a degree in CS and a history of not being fired from previous jobs. References were checked which also filtered out the boobs, so testing your your code fluency was overkill. Multiple rounds of phone interviews were rare; multiple visits happened NEVER.
Apparently these days, your academic and professional track record and references count for zero. Instead, you must show you can generate code at high speed -- as if you were a newb grad who likely might turn out to be able only to pass true/false tests in the classroom.
Do degrees and references now count for so little? Must the number of interviewers exceed double digits? If so, THAT's a broken system.
Most schools still teach CS, but most the industry needs SWE. So the degree isn't an indicator you know how to build products as much as it is you can't stick out a 4yr program and do Big O notation.
For perspective, thirty years ago programming was a career for motivated dorks and weirdos and didn't interest normal people, computers were so underpowered that simply getting it to do something implied much more competence than it does today, and software industry salaries weren't insanely overinflated so there were fewer unqualified applicants. The hiring situation thirty years ago doesn't seem that relevant to today.
Before the rise of FAANGs, the interview visit consumed between 1-2 hours (if it was a car drive away) and no more than one day (if a plane ride) with absolutely no homework. In-person, you talked to between 3 and 8 people. At most onerous, the discussion might involve a little pseudocode or drawing diagrams on a white board to show you possessed the skills most prized back then -- fluency in design concepts, the ability to focus and reason well, to communicate ably, and to think on your feet. Syntax skills were presumed given that you had a degree in CS and a history of not being fired from previous jobs. References were checked which also filtered out the boobs, so testing your your code fluency was overkill. Multiple rounds of phone interviews were rare; multiple visits happened NEVER.
Apparently these days, your academic and professional track record and references count for zero. Instead, you must show you can generate code at high speed -- as if you were a newb grad who likely might turn out to be able only to pass true/false tests in the classroom.
Do degrees and references now count for so little? Must the number of interviewers exceed double digits? If so, THAT's a broken system.