Software Dev here: The biggest challenge were the stupid interviews. An online furniture selling shop asked me a NP complete problem in the interview. No probl

Software Dev here: The biggest challenge were the stupid interviews. An online furniture selling shop asked me a NP complete problem in the interview. No problem with that but their compensation wasn't even half of what FAANGs would offer. And I bet most of the engineers over there wouldn't be able to solve it without preparing for it first. When you're interviewing someone, you feel smart because you already know the questions but these shops make it incredibly hard for the average joe to get in. Questions like design a logging library or a rate limiter in a 45 minute interview cannot possibly be solved. Most interviewers think they're evaluating the candidate on merit but in my experience it's just to check if the candidate says what they want to hear.