The bar has also been raised significantly. I had an interview recently where I solved the algorithm question very quickly, but didn't refactor/clean up my code perfectly and was rejected.
For example, does it mean: the actual skill level (e.g., smartness) people actually look for and hire hasn't changed, but the activities that hiring teams require candidates to have experience with are (seemingly weirdly) not a great thing to need anyway and therefore lots of great candidates end up twiddling their thumbs?
In that way, the "height" of the bar is the same, but it's a "weird" bar, in that one could have to accept it for what it is, or even stoop to it, or perhaps shift over to it, in order to pass it?
Or more that the overall interview experiences are weird caricatures in and of themselves?
Weird is a great word, but it can be a little non-specific, so I'm left curious about the intended usage/meaning.
If you don’t have specific experience with some CTOs favorite esoteric API or don’t have experience in the same, specific corner of some insurance or usury industry, your ability to actually engineer solutions is considered irrelevant.
It’s as if the industry has forgotten that building software is about the application of algorithms to data structures to accomplish some user need. Instead, company after company wants to hot glue some service via some API using some framework on some cloud platform. And because the MBA decision-maker can write Excel macros with GPT, we don’t need programmers to build systems anymore. Just wire up foo SaaS to bar SaaS and MVPFailFastLeanAgile our way to success!
Sorry for the rant…
They just know the keywords the EMs and C suite sent them in the headcount request.