Tech hiring has been broken for a while now, but with the current shift into AI workflows, it's completely busted.
"Vibe coding" without an iota of technical prowess may not be the future of software development, but neither is knowing how do bunch of comp sci homework while someone watches you awkwardly.
The best devs I know are moving so fast that the idea of sitting down to, by hand, write some binary tree inversion, or whatever, is beyond laughable.
The frank reality is this: the traditional interview process tests for skills that are rapidly (if not already) becoming useless commodities.
The durable skills for the next era of software development are:
- Taste and product sense.
- The ability to architect robust, scalable systems.
- Deep, creative problem-solving.
- Learning how to learn better.
The ivory tower types aren't leaving the castle; the castle is just far, far more accessible now.
Good engineering practices still matter. A lot. The faster you can build, the faster you can build yourself into a dead end. Knowledge acquired through experience will likely always reign supreme.
But we're through the looking glass now. LeetCode is dead. Long live the LeetCode agents.