> The good times for the career software engineer - the kind that aces LeetCode, optimizes for career growth and collects the right buzzwords on their resume has indeed come to an end, but there's still plenty of good times to be had to if you are a career problem solver.
But are companies adjusting their hiring process to find career problem solvers? Or are they still looking for buzzword-spewing leetcode solvers? If you ask candidates who have interviewed recently, they'll probably tell you that companies are going even more extreme towards the leetcode side.
Is anyone actually hiring, or succeeding in hiring? I see the hiring market being completely fucked for the past couple years with lots of fraud happening on both sides - whether it's ghost positions that are never intended to be filled, or monkeys LLM'ing (or I guess we call it "vibe coding" now) their way through interviews, which just makes the interviews even harder to a level even seasoned engineers now need to cheat or be left behind.
It's become a market for lemons, with no good solutions. The problem is that it fundamentally requires a lot of manpower to accurately assess someone's experience (whether you use LC or just an open-ended whiteboard exercise) and companies who hire have only so many engineer-hours to dedicate to interviewing and the amount of inbound candidates exceeds that by orders of magnitude.
The way I see it, a lot of companies realized they have the staff they need and hiring more through "normal" channels is impossible due to the above - so either they don't need to hire more, or they hire informally through back-channels and word of mouth (because the front door is being DDoS'd).
The only way to win is not to play - the "front door" and typical hiring process is no longer possible unless you are a big name and have somehow publicly demonstrated your skills (past product launch, etc) in a way that can be verified in 5 minutes. For the rest of us, it's mostly a sales and networking game, and leveraging human & in-person relationships that are (for now) still immune to LLMs and hordes of boiler rooms spamming every single job with fake (but plausible) resumes.
But are companies adjusting their hiring process to find career problem solvers? Or are they still looking for buzzword-spewing leetcode solvers? If you ask candidates who have interviewed recently, they'll probably tell you that companies are going even more extreme towards the leetcode side.