https://www.karllhughes.com/posts/plumbing

I read a post online recently about how some software engineer was asked to complete a technically complex, jargon-filled coding challenge over the phone in order to get a job. He did well enough on the call to get an offer, but after he started the new job, he realized it wasn’t going to be the academically challenging role he was hoping for. No, he’d just be building basic CRUD applications for the web with a legacy system haphazardly running on whatever virtual machine could be found.

This happens all the time during job-screening. We put engineers through rigorous screening processes and ask them intellectually stimulating questions, only to hire them and put them into the admittedly dull task of wiring up 5 or 6 services and making the screen look pretty. I’m not saying there aren’t skills involved in those tasks - I’m simply saying that those aren’t the same skills being tested for in most whiteboarding-style challenges.