There is a lot of cynicism in this thread, including this from the OP: > This is also what Software Engineering has become: you memorize, regurgitate and parti

There is a lot of cynicism in this thread, including this from the OP: > This is also what Software Engineering has become: you memorize, regurgitate and participate in agile the masquerade. Creativity is shunned. Tried architectures/patterns are what is expected. No, not really. Maybe some jobs are like that. Many are not. But even the jobs that are not like that will generally be gated by interviews that include Leetcode-style questions. This happened in the software industry because credentials and experience often mean nothing, resume fraud is rampant, and the cost of hiring a bad engineer is very high. How about a take-home assignment? Suggest that and many will respond, "I don't work for free" or "I don't have time to work after work, I have a family to take care of." How about just looking at prior experience, or credentials? Resume fraud prevents that, and a lot of companies prefer to hire generalists and find a team for them to work in, rather than hire specialists for a particular team. Outside of research-heavy fields like AI/ML, a university degree is no predictor of success. So, we need to find a way to evaluate a candidate, in a short period of time, that gives a reasonable estimation of how they will do in the job. If there was a better way, and it was proved to be better, the industry would adopt it very quickly, and it would be a competitive advantage for the companies that realized it first. But that has not happened. If you put aside the cheap cynicism that permeates threads about programming interviews, you'll realize it hasn't happened because none of the people who are hiring have figured out a more reliable way to hire, even though there are very smart people doing it and they have an enormous financial incentive to figure out how to do it better. A company that could find all the good programmers who can't Leetcode, and weed out the bad programmers who can't Leetcode, would get an enormous amount of talent that others overlooked. This is just a hoop to jump through, and it's not nearly as difficult as getting a college degree or learning how to code in the first place. I'm not saying it's easy, I'm saying it's doable with time and practice. Most of your colleagues have done it at your current job and also at your future job. I can't do it at the drop of a hat either; I would need to practice like almost everyone else. You can do it too, if you approach it with the right mindset: you aren't supposed to enjoy it or find it intellectually interesting; it's just an obstacle to overcome and it's smaller than many other obstacles you've dealt with before.