> The Idiotic "Most People Cannot Program" Myth Once you do enough interviews, you realize this isn't a myth. Okay, maybe most is too strong of a qualifier. Bu

> The Idiotic "Most People Cannot Program" Myth Once you do enough interviews, you realize this isn't a myth. Okay, maybe most is too strong of a qualifier. But the reality is that a title of Senior Software Engineer doesn't imply the ability to translate human problems into machine-executable code in a structured way. It's very possible that a "Senior Software Engineer" has been working at a small consultancy on the same project for 5+ years, has few if any technical teammates, and spends most of their time copy and pasting StackOverflow answers and doing "guess and check" programming to do bug fixes for a legacy VB6 or FoxPro app. I'd know, as I've worked with those people. That being said... > The interviewer asked me a very basic question– something small like how to create a table(or something silly like that). If you're asking syntax questions in an interview, you've already lost. For technical interviews, the thought process is far more important than the end result. Again, programming is the act of turning human problems into machine code in a structured, repeatable way. Pseudocode is sufficient for this. Forget whether you should be using `sort` or `sorted` in python? Me too, so just tell me what you expect the sort method to do and move on. So yes, asking for the SQL create table syntax in an interview is absurd and the author is right to complain here. > Actually talk about their fucking resume... You can easily filter out people who just coasted along vs those who accomplished something. Sorry, but you cannot. Some people are excellent at bullshitting and making themselves sound like incredible workers, especially if they've had time to prepare. You'll hear amazing stories of late nights and heroic effort, but they were often done by other people and merely observed by the interviewee, or just fabrications.