alt Hacker News> A lot of these people … just suck.
Another possibility is that their job subtly drifted.
I wrote a lot of code as a grad student but my first interviews afterward were disasters. Why? Because I’d spent the last few months writing my thesis and the few months before that writing a very specific kinds of code (signal processing, visualization) that were miles away from generic interview questions like “Make the longest palindrome.”
We don't ask "make the longest palindrome". We ask "convert this English into code that does what it says". If you want to make the discussion more concrete, we have a public practice problem [1] that we send out with our interview bookings so that people know what to expect. The real problems we ask are very similar to it.
Do you feel like there's anything there that any reasonably skilled programmer shouldn't be able to figure out on the fly?
[1] https://www.otherbranch.com/shared/practice-coding-problem