Comment by getnormality 12 hours ago
There's no fix for this problem in hiring upfront. Anyone can cram and fake if they expect a gravy train on the other end. If you want people to work after they're hired, you have to be able to give direct negative feedback, and if that doesn't work, fire quickly and easily.
>Anyone can cram and fake if they expect a gravy train on the other end.
If you're still asking trvia, yes. Maybe it's time to shift from the old filter and update the process?
If you can see in the job that a 30 minute PR is the problem, then maybe replace that 3rd leetcode round with 30 minutes of pair programming. Hard to chatGPT in real time without sounding suspicion.
That approach to interviewing will cause a lot of false negatives. Many developers, especially juniors, get anxious when thrown into a pair programming task with someone they don't know and will perform badly regardless of their actual skills.
I understand that and had some hard anxiety myself back then. Even these days I may be a bit shakey when love coding in an interview setting?
But is the false negative for a nervous pair programmer worse than a false positive for a leetcode question? Ideally a good interviewer would be able to separate the anxiety from the actual thinking and see that this person can actually think, but that's another undervalued skill among industry.
I don’t know why people are so hesitant to just fire bad people. It’s pretty obvious when someone starts actually working if they’re going to a net positive. On the order of weeks, not months.
Given how much these orgs pay, both direct to head hunters and indirect in interview time, might as well probationally hire the whoever passes the initial sniff test.
That also lets you evaluate longer term habits like punctuality, irritability, and overall not-being-a-jerkness.
The same could be said for leetcode. Except leetcode doesn't test actual skills in 2025.
The bar for “junior” has quietly turned into “mid-level with 3 years of production experience, a couple of open-source contributions, and perfect LeetCode” while still paying junior money. Companies list “0-2 years” but then grill candidates on system design, distributed tracing, and k8s internals like they’re hiring for staff roles. No wonder the pipeline looks broken. I’ve interviewed dozens of actual juniors in the last six months. Most can ship features, write clean code, and learn fast, but they get rejected for not knowing the exact failure modes of Raft or how to tune JVM garbage collection on day one. The same companies then complain they “can’t find talent” and keep raising the bar instead of actually training people.
Real junior hiring used to mean taking someone raw, pairing them heavily for six months, and turning them into a solid mid. Now the default is “we’ll only hire someone who needs zero ramp-up” and then wonder why the market feels empty.