My wife for example is a doctor. They have cabinets of 4 GP, 1 of them as we found out is a proper sociopath with very unstable personality when things are not perfect. He is driving whole cabinet which employs 10 people to the ground very effectively, wife is running away and hoping it will collapse only after she got out legally. If it wasn't for psycho moves of this guy that cabinet would thrive. While he is consistently being reported as a great doctor by his patients. She is moving into another cabinet where head of it understood it extremely well, and is super picky about people from personality perspective.
People here on HN love stories about experts saving the world, they as experts see themselves in that position. In real life, thats hardly ever the case, most long term problems come from people and not how you solve technical challenges. Once you covered this by far the most important aspect, then of course professional excellence is next step. Never make the mistake of changing the order of those 2, ever.
Having a brilliant misfit at the wrong position can tank a team.
Lets assume we are talking about a reasonable candidate with good social skills, and a higher-than-average tech skills (that would be a charitable interpretation of the original comment).
I don't care about parties either but if I'm going to have to work with you I need to know you fit in a little, creating software is collaborative. In real life, in real companies you are not solving leetcode problems all the time - so why hire based on that? Person A is super intelligent but abrasive and person B is half as smart but super easy to work with. 100% of the time I pick person B.
> having awareness of software principles is really worthless
This is nonsense, you are already expected to know this
> I've seen files with 13k lines of if/else/switch, how do you test that shit .-.
I've seen those too, but don't pretend that's unique to a specific country. There are shitty software developers everywhere.