You must not have tried to hire a software engineer before. In a hiring cycle I encounter multiple "Senior Engineers" who can't write basic code. Fizzbuzz. Can't do it. Engineers should absolutely expect to write real code in an interview. It's preposterous to think that someone can claim to have 20 years experience writing code and then be offended to spend 20 minutes doing it in an interview.
I make a judgement call - either I end the interview immediately or skip most of the rest of the interview, let them think they made it all the way through the interview and say that we will get back to them with a decision later. When I end it immediately they usually take it badly but these are times that I just can’t justify wasting any more time on them. The bad reactions run the normal gamut of bad human reactions: angry, sad, indifferent, humor, etc.
> [I] let them think they made it all the way through the interview
Maybe then, although they get rejected later, they still won't be particularly upset at your company -- since the in person interaction was friendly and positive (i suppose), and you can take some time and write a friendly rejection email or phone call too (i suppose you have a template)
I have been a tech interviewer for a decade, and this is spot on. The entire reason FizzBuzz-style questions are popular in screening interviews is that most people fail them.
I imagine this problem is much worse at large, highly paid, highly desirable companies. My experience in hiring at smaller companies has not shown this. I've never had a candidate with 10+ years of experience who couldn't code.
We are a smaller org and hire occasionally for roles that are most suitable for early career applicants.
We always get several applicants with 10-20 years of experience who have programming projects on their resume or described in their cover letters.
But in our (very minimal) technical evaluations, lots of these candidates can't do anything at all. No coding, psueudo-code, nothing.
Usually, it turns out they have been really doing light IT work for years - using reporting tools, maintaining little scripts, even just some Excel jockeying. But they still think of themselves as software engineers.
My gut feeling is that lots of these candidates could learn (relearn?) to code, but have spent years not coding.
I don't have the numbers in front of me, but I would guess that the majority of these types of candidates (10-20 years of experience) that apply to our roles can't code in an interview situation and haven't been programming recently.
It is definitely not all of the experienced candidates who fit that profile. The few very experienced candidates we get who can code are often excellent but are looking for salaries well beyond our range.
We hired one who couldn't. He turned out to be more of a mentor/big vision/best practices guy. Which is probably OK to have one or two of those if you're a large enough org.
But we had 3 devs. I think he gave some great advice (and looking back - still think so 12 years later), but it just wasn't what we needed at the time.
The funny thing is, when we let him go (he knew it was coming - he wasn't blind to the problems) he got hired at a company we worked regularly with. Things worked out much better for him there.
