I can usually tell by the interview process. Three years ago I interviewed (and received offers) from two companies paying about the same.

Company 1: First question was to do a merge sort on the board. Second question was to do some sql statements.

Company 2: “We are starting a new greenfield project and all we have are two developers who have been writing PowerBuilder code, stored procedures, and they are just learning C#. What would be your 90 day plan to start the project”. The correct answer started with budget requirements, training requirements, hiring contractors, etc.

Guess which job I took?

Two years later my complete interview process around the job I took was around making processes more “cloud native” and more highly available as opposed to one I didn’t take where they asked me to write code on a board to generate a Fibonacci sequence.

Short version: if they ask you to do coding whiteboard interviews instead of architectural interviews, you’re being hired as a software engineer.

There's really no consensus on what some of these job titles mean. IMO if it has "engineer" in the title, you're doing more than just writing algorithms. I'd say that in your example, Company 1 was looking for a developer or programmer, whereas the other company was looking for a software engineer or product engineer.

Also, IMO the term "Product Engineer" does not denote that it has to be software-related at all. It could be someone who designs shoes or training seminars or whatever (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_engineering).

Yet and still the stereotypical “software engineer” jobs at big tech companies focus on your ability to do leetCode style whiteboard coding and “reversing a binary tree”.

I think product engineer is used loosely within the software field same as product manager and product engineer. Not to be taken literally as per Wikipedia definition.

Both of these interview questions sound awful though. Are we supposed to think company 2 sounds like a good, high profile ‘product engineer’ job, rather than an indication that you will be expected to fulfill about five radically different different job roles (engineer, interviewer, project manager, mentor, customer manager, etc)?

Yes. And I loved the second job. I left my permanent position for the contract to perm position (got health benefits through my wife’s job) . Billed them an average of 60-70 hours a week, paid off some debt the first six months, negotiated a decent market pay and a title bump to put on my resume and by the time I was made perm, I had a large enough team in place and processes so I was down to a manageable 45 hours a week.

But, I made it clear at the interview that my first steps would be to build up the department, develop processes and training. They already had a barely working 20 year old PowerBuilder implementation where the various offices were forced to use Citrix terminals to access the system. They needed some tighter web and mobile integrations they couldn’t currently do.

I found out the real money was in cloud consulting. They hired a few consultants to “move us to the cloud” (a bunch of no nothing “lift and shifters”). I found out that’s where the real money was.

Left there after a year and half with a better resume, self demoted (responsibility not pay) to my current job and I’m getting a chance to fill in some resume gaps to become a more well rounded (and paid) consultant in a couple of years.

Interesting point.