You're right that there are plenty of developers that have no experience with GitHub, but I'm sure there are far more who would struggle with simple theoretical questions and programming quizzes during the interview, because it's difficult to think clearly when you're feeling a lot of pressure.

In fact one might say that the Aeronautics industry is in far better shape than the Software industry, a failure in one of their systems results in people dying but I can go to any major tech companies websites and experience a bug on any given day.

A thorough interview in physical engineering disciplines will often expect you to demonstrate/validate something about your technical skill in-person, unless you are being interviewed because people already have validated knowledge about your capabilities (e.g., hiring a known individual from a competitor that is well-respected among peers).

To your point, a physical engineering interview might be more about "spot checks" than "assume the person is lying so ask them to complete a bevy of undergraduate final exam questions". In the software world, maybe that would be akin to starting with FizzBuzz and finding other ways to get solid proof the person can implement, not just talk. To me, if you have open source work that can be read by an interviewer, I would find it disrespectful for that interviewer to act as though the work doesn't exist and they should verify from scratch you can actually write working code.

It's comparatively a lot harder to just have a conversation with a software person and be certain they have the technical competence they claim vs. other technical realms. I tend to think it is the nature of the subject, as well as the salaries drawing in more charlatans than in physical engineering realms.

> In fact one might say that the Aeronautics industry is in far better shape than the Software industry, a failure in one of their systems results in people dying but I can go to any major tech companies websites and experience a bug on any given day.

This probably has more to do with Aeronautics actually practicing engineering as compared to today's software development practices. Also software development as a field is far less mature than traditional engineering disciplines. That's not meant to be pejorative - it's just where humanity is.

This to me is one of the worst things about the Tech industry. You could be a senior engineer at Google and to move to a new company you will have to do the same algorithm interviews that New Grads are doing. It's a bad look for the industry. Like oh I see on your resume that you have worked for Facebook, Google and Amazon, well we better put you though an algorithm interview because you could have just been a false positive at all 3 companies. It massively devalues SWEs in an industry that we already know colludes to depress wages.

>This probably has more to do with Aeronautics actually practicing engineering as compared to today's software development practices. Also software development as a field is far less mature than traditional engineering disciplines. That's not meant to be pejorative - it's just where humanity is.

Not disagreeing but my point was that they have a far better performance record despite not doing the bizarre interviews that the Tech industry favors.

EEs definitely go through basic, advanced, and domain-specific circuit design questions in their interviews. And compared to LEETCODE they are much more difficult to prepare for too.

There is a reason why SWE is a fallback option for many other engineering disciplines -- resources like leetcode and low barrier of entry to learning make it much more accessible.