That said, it continues to strain credulity that 50% of interviewees for engineering jobs suffer from forgetting the most fundamental of tools in the face of an interview.
So I am led inescapably to the conclusion that there are indeed many people out there who only have skills on paper.
that in 50% of interviews for engineering jobs, the interviewees...
Fixed to be more precise.
Which is more improbable, that programmers who tend to be socially awkward and work alone in front of a computer and are not stage performers get "stage fright" during interviews, or that people with many years of experience getting paid as a programmer can't do anything? To me, the latter strains credulity.
And when you're told that your career rests on how perfectly you do in this interview and that any deviations from perfection will make you fail, is it any wonder people get anxious?
I once almost failed the most common leetcode easy problem because my mind blanked and I implemented the wrong solution at first. Interviewer probably labeled me as someone with fake credentials as I didn't have time for their second problem as a result.
That said, sometimes they're basic skills. In one job a few back, I did a lot of resume-reading and phone screening. I used basic questions. A solid 50% of screenees failed FizzBuzz.
Now, it's absolutely possible that many of these were just nerves. Not everyone handled interview tension well! But it strains credulity for me to accept that being nervous makes half of software engineers forget how to do a loop, conditional, and modulo.