There is a huge pool of exceptional junior engineers

When I hire juniors, I try to give them problems that I know they likely won't be able to solve in the interview because I want to see how they think about things. The problem has become that a lot of kids coming out of college have done little more than memorize Leetcode problems and outsourced classwork to AI. I've also seen less and less passion for the career as the years go by (ie. less computer nerds).

Unless the company is doing something that requires almost no special domain knowledge, it's almost inevitable that it's going to take a good while for them to on-board. For us, it usually takes about year to get them to the point that they can contribute without some form of handholding. However, that also mostly holds true for seniors coming to us from other industries.

    I've also seen less and less passion for the career as the years go by (ie. less computer nerds).

I have such strong but mixed feelings about this.

There were major downsides to the days when programmers were all computer nerds. Specifically, it made the career very off-putting to anybody who didn't fit that stereotype. Any time you do that, you miss out on a lot of potential talent.

Still, though. There were upsides. The passion level seemed higher. The climbing salaries attracted people solely attracted to... the climbing salaries.

I'm tired of being treated like a fucking Martian because I understand basic data structures and why sometimes you might want to use a tree or some other computer science 101 shit.

   When I hire juniors, I try to give them problems 
   that I know they likely won't be able to solve in 
   the interview because I want to see how they think 
   about things.

Are you explicit about this when you pose the problems?

I can see an upside to not telling them. If they try to bullshit their way through an answer because they think a definitive answer is expected, I guess that could be a useful data point. But it feels mean and unethical.

When I've done this as interviewer I've been pretty explicit. Like, "Hey, this is something we've been working our way through for months and we don't expect you to figure it out in ten minutes. But how might you approach this?"

I have fairly limited experience as an interviewer so I'm curious how others have approached this.