Yeah, I know, I do try to do that. I just don't really interview often enough to get much better at getting over the anxiety, because despite that I've never re

Yeah, I know, I do try to do that. I just don't really interview often enough to get much better at getting over the anxiety, because despite that I've never really had trouble finding good jobs. I only bring it up to confirm that yes, some of those "fakers" (maybe lots of them) aren't faking, they're just exceptionally shit at a particular kind of interview. Truly, I expect that the set of people who can do a really good job of talking the talk but aren't actually competent at writing code is pretty small, because faking being able to program and talk off-the-cuff about technical topics reflects a fair amount of talent at something else that ought to pay pretty well on its own, in other roles. I think the way those algo-quiz or live-code-a-thing filters are used tends to catch people who can't talk well about it or do the job (this is the majority of would-be "bad hires", and you'd catch them anyway), some set who are afflicted with extremely bad general social anxiety so who are just fucked at interviews generally (I feel bad for those folks, especially since some of them are probably fine in normal work-social situations); the ones like me who can do the job, and can talk about it fluently, but suck at "coding interviews"; plus some very small set of actual social geniuses who've decided lying their way into so-so tech jobs is what they want to do with their lives, and have the talent (at faking it) to back that up, which are the ones people seem to think are super-common in the wild, for some reason, which seems very implausible to me for the simple reason that, again, that's a skill that's per se valuable elsewhere, if you're actually that good. (frankly, from what I've seen on the other side of the table, I suspect you could weed out a very high percentage of actual-fakers by just blanket rejecting anyone with any kind of graduate degree in CS, who's applying for a mediocre position rather than something flashier and better-paying, though obviously that would come with its own set of pretty bad false negatives and I wouldn't actually do it, and anyway even those people usually don't "talk the talk" well enough to be convincing, if you get them off-script) [EDIT] incidentally, FAANG and finance and a few of their peers are the ones where these kinds of aggressive weed-outs do sorta make sense, because their comp is so high that those "social geniuses" I mentioned might actually make more money faking their way into those tech jobs than applying their outstanding non-tech skills more directly to another role, such that it's worth it despite the stress and risk of being "found out".