I enjoyed the blog post. It didn't break new ground, but it is still useful and a little therapeutic for me to read these posts. I have made it a personal goal

I enjoyed the blog post. It didn't break new ground, but it is still useful and a little therapeutic for me to read these posts. I have made it a personal goal to have a career in the tech industry that doesn't require taking technical exam interviews. It's something I understand I need to work on - to earn, really, it's not something that just happens. My approach is to do this by consulting, speaking, teaching workshops, doing projects, and eventually building a network, mainly through contacts with non-technical people who value my assistance. It actually has been working. This approach has, however, required taking a hard pass on what have turned out to be very good career opportunities. But since I very rarely pass a technical exam interview, I'm not really sure what I've lost. Another factor - I was a math major and did a grad degree in operations research, so while I've written lots and lots of code and wouldn't really call myself "self-taught", I'm not really a great match for SE roles. Yes, I did code for graphs and trees, factoring primes, solving diff eq's and optimization problems, and so forth, but this was within the context of math classes, not CS. So I never took any formal CS beyond the intro in college. Over time, I realized that's not a coincidence, I actually was't really interested in code per so, I was interested in what questions I can answer with code. One thing I mention here on HN - I can absolutely create and search a binary tree, DFS and BFS. I've been able to implement merge sort and recursively print all permutations of a string or set. I believe the claim that a tech interviews are used to filter out those who "just can't code" is a myth. The questions I get in later rounds of tech interviews are far more elaborate than this (for example: find all matching subtrees in a binary tree at the whiteboard, in 45 minutes). Here's the thing - I actually have used trees extensively in my work (I needed to find the shortest path to passing a series of interrelated tests where various groupings were adequate). I looked it up, learned it, coded in it... but eventually it left short term memory. Had I taken a tech interview test on exactly the same topic aa year later, I would surely have failed. I just don't walk around with this all loaded up in my head, and I feel that I've re-loaded it for an interview for the last time (I would happily reload it for a real project). And I'll sign off with my usual: companies are free to filter out candidates based on very intricate technical tests, but I have zero sympathy when they complain about a shortage of good candidates. And this becomes sinister when they claim that this shortage means that they should be empowered to bestow limited residency rights on someone where they control how the person interviews, what the person works on, where the person lives and works, and when the person shows up at the office.