Whiteboards are an unbelievable utopia compared to so many other disciplines. It's an amazing stroke of luck that software developers don't have to do medical-style "residencies". We don't have to rely on letters of recommendation from our professors (hope that professor you slaved away for for six years doesn't have a bad day when he writes your letter!) We don't have to pay thousands of dollars to take excruciating standardized tests to obtain certifications that expire in a decade. We don't have to do unpaid internships, we don't even have to wear business suits to the interview.

Software devs don't realize how many people in the world would kill to have things as good as we have them.

The problem is those things only get you in the door, then it 100% comes down to your whiteboard under-fire skills - which admittedly have gotten worse for me the older I get. Although I know I'm a better programmer now.

But I'm not sure it's that developers are being given gold and don't recognize it. It's that developers are being given mud and recognize it, while most other people are being given shit instead.

I'd rather be handed a pile of mud than a pile of shit, but it's not hard to feel that there must be some alternative that's better than either.

(Maybe there isn't, though. Matching candidates to jobs is just hard, I think; everyone's incentives are misaligned, performance is difficult to predict, it's amazingly difficult to get past your initial snap judgements or even to realise that you're failing to do so, etc.)

That's a solid point. Yeah, engineering interviewing could be better, a lot better, but as we push to improve it, it's really important to keep in mind how privileged we are. I remember having a discussion with one of my friends in a different field who was thrilled to get a recruiter pinging them on Linkedin, for example.

Also, given how chaotic the field is, and how people come from all sides (some with CS degrees, some self taught, some who worked at great tech companies, some who didn't, etc), assuming everyone's a bullshitter is unfortunately kind of expected. We absolutely should treat people with respect and dignity, but that doesn't mean being naive either.

And in other fields getting fired and even demotions are pretty common, while in big tech hubs thats nearly unheard of, except for extreme cases or very very entry level people.

A lot of people can speak (very deeply) about many topics, but as soon as they're in front of a keyboard it falls apart.

You cant directly compare a professional job to say an skilled worker in a corner store / bodega - we may have similar problems but they express them selves in very different ways.

When was the last time you saw a news story about a Ceng / PE getting disbarred? Stories about doctors are much more common.

1) Extremely regulated fields with strict education, training and certification requirements (eg: a physician)

2) Fields where you have to show something. Designers frequently need to have extensive portfolios. Carpenters need both that and real world referrals of happy customers (not just nearly automated HR checks we have in software dev where no one will say anything bad out of fear of getting sued)

3) Trial period followed by sink or swim. Come work for us and if it doesn't work out we'll demote you or fire you. There's a few places like that (I think its Netflix's model?), but generally firing someone has everyone around calling foul.

Thats absolutely my personal preference. The argument against it (very valid), is that if someone with a family relying on their paycheck quits their job to go work at another with that policy, and gets let go after 3 months, they're kind of fucked.

We could have this for our field - and to a certain extent we already do, at least via a github repo. Only problem is, nobody seems to look at them.

People have mentioned that SWEs should have a portfolio - but I've never worked for a company they let me take home code and put it in my portfolio. For web development, I may or may not be able to point to a specific site and show someone "see this here, I developed this part" - and even if I could, how would I prove it? Most of the time, it doesn't matter - as that code/feature/website is likely gone or changed by that time.

So you only have a couple of options to develop a portfolio, and those options only work for some people, not all: Either contribute to an open source project, or work on your own side-projects, putting them all up on github or similar repository you can reference.

But not everyone has the time or inclination to do this.

There are significant pushbacks in some communities that this isn't inclusive, because people can't spend that much time outside of work hours to build one (and as you pointed out, internal code can't really be included).

Graphic designers and stuff are always sketching/drawing stuff on the side for their portfolios though, and that seems pretty expected, so... /shrugs.

Technical interviews where you look at some code and review it, or is asked to broadly describe how to design a system etc isn't unreasonable, and as you say it's better than judging only on poise...

As if it's a given the whiteboard process actually provides a useful measure of technical competence.

All of the complaining is tiresome. Some companies have difficult interviews, many do not. Who cares?

Guess the gist is that bottom of the barrel jobs have easier interviews. I could buy that.

Don't forget the interviewer's arbitrary "system" for weeding out applicants that has no basis in research and varies from one hiring manager to the next.