Most of the things that make us better during our career have nothing to do with programming faster: If anything, they can make us program slower, and do worse

Most of the things that make us better during our career have nothing to do with programming faster: If anything, they can make us program slower, and do worse in interviews. For instance, an interview I took last year came with a premise that I found downright bonkers. It was based on code the company had in production, but it stopped being a good problem to look at years before. I was having trouble coming up with the right tradeoffs for the implementation because all my experience was telling me that the entire approach was misguided in the first place, so the problem should not be solved. I passed, but it was a far rougher performance than I would have liked. There's also how being far from college makes the least important knowledge gained fade away, and the least important thing I studied was memorizing algorithms. I write new algorithms at work sometimes, and I implement off the shelf ones too, but I don't have to recall them off the top of my head. Nobody has to implement distributed consensus algorithms under time pressure, or write HyperLogLog from memory. So ultimately, there's what easy to measure, and then there's what is valuable and important. We go with what is easy, and those are things that are taught in college. Understanding the right level of testing or designing a system for observability are far more valuable in the long run: It's crazy how much downtime in well known companies comes from people not learning those things in college. But since we are bad at measuring those things, and kids right out of school don't know them, we don't interview for that. And sadly this is why we all end up hiring by network so much: We can't tell if someone is good in a day, and we can't really ask people to dedicate two weeks to work with us in a probationary period if they have real jobs, but we sure can recall quality former coworkers and ask them to join in.