That said, it sounds like you and I are both "cultivating" and "tending to" our profession. I think that's what it takes to stay competitive and have longevity imo.

I got into vicious codependent cycle with my job by the time I was 35. I didn’t know enough to be competitive and leave, I was bitter about my pay and they just kept me around because I knew where the bodies were buried. Since then, it’s all about optionality. If I go more than a month not enjoying my environment it’s time to leave.

Considering swinging the pendulum the other way to hands on technical again and let others do the BS work. Do you know anything about the north Atlanta market? Companies, salary range, culture? Or maybe ones to avoid...Thanks!

With today’s data privacy concerns and tough European regulations I don’t think this attitude is acceptable.

I hope the field makes a return to appreciating fundamentals.

That being said, I was on the hiring committee at my last job and personally, I found the best way to hire engineers is to just chat with them about previous projects. I'd usually run through one or two, "just confirming you can code" whiteboard questions and then ask them to tell me about a project they are proud of that they had a large part in. If you ask questions that dig into the project ("How did you do X?", "Why did you do Y?", "Now that it's over, what would you change?") you can usually get a pretty good idea of their skill level and knowledge as a developer as well as some great insights into their personality.

Obviously, that's much harder to scale and more subject to bias, but it worked for me.

Short of industry wide collaboration with some kind of longitudinal study, getting an idea of what does and doesn't work in terms of false negatives is nearly impossible.

1. are my false positives low?

2. is the time it takes to fill a position low?

If the answer to both of those questions is "yes" then the system is great for me (and I've seen the system described above provide affirmative answers to both these questions in a startup setting).

Determining whether a hiring system is locally good is significantly easier than determining if it's good in general.

The problem is that you don't know the cost of the false negatives; you don't know whether the people you didn't hire would have greatly improved your processes / code / business

It’s probably not the stuff you know how to do that makes or breaks your company. Either someone else does it, or you “figure it out” and hopefully you know if you did it right before it’s too late.

How do you hire someone to be good at stuff you aren’t already good at? There’s gonna be a lot of those in the false negatives pile.

Realistically if a dev gets a leetcode interview they don't want to do, most of them can just cancel and likely get an interview with someone else next week if they're actively applying to jobs.