Please stop the coding challenges

The more people online complain about coding interviews, the more confident I am that they are the absolute best way to filter candidates for a software development job. Across the industry there are way too many talkers/pretenders/meeting schedulers and not enough people who can roll up their sleeves, jump into the code and actually get stuff done. And this problem becomes worse at higher levels. You can bitch about it all you want, but you aren't owed that cushy $500K/yr FAANG job. If you can't get yourself to brush up on basic programming and write some for loops then companies will simply move on to someone who will.

Maybe there were in the past, currently there is entire industry there to help you game the system.

- Cracking the coding interview.

- Elements of programming interviews in Java|Python|whatever...

- leetcode & other sides with paid premium subscriptions...

- mock interview bootcamps...

It's no longer about skill, it's only about gaming the system.

What do you mean “gaming the system”?

The companies ask that candidates learn how to solve algorithm problems and the candidates do it.

I would call it “everyone playing a game they agreed to play by the rules they agreed to play with.”

And I don’t know what you mean by “it’s no longer about skill.” It still takes a lot of skill to be able to solve hard algorithm problems, even if you took a course on how to solve them and practiced solving them for 6 months.

When you audition for an orchestra they give you the sheet music ahead of time. It doesn’t mean you have no skill if you practice first instead of just showing up to sight read the music.

Tech interview preparation mostly boils down to rote memorization not really what I would call “developing a skill”. You just cram enough until you can pattern match any kind of DSA or system design problem and apply the solution you memorized. Once you finally land the job, you’re free to forget everything. Then you begin to develop “real skill” on the job.