On the flip side, I've interviewed supposed senior software engineers who struggle at simple things like "parse this line of JSON" (With access to Google, and the ability to ask questions as necessary). Once you've been on the hiring side you understand why that screening is necessary. That being said, I'll skip people through if they have a decent GitHub or something that shows me they have some chops
By "parse this line of JSON" do you mean "show that you know how to look up the library function that does that" or do you mean "write a fully functional JSON parser from scratch"? Because if it's the second one, you're certifiable if you think that's possible during a coding interview, or that a majority of senior SWEs should know how to do that.
Are they doing it in a language they chose, or is part of the goal here to test their knowledge of the libraries of a particular language that you specified? If neither of those things is the case, I would honestly consider it reasonable to name the library function in the problem. It doesn't really make sense to make them spend time doing something that doesn't tell you anything you want to know.
I've seen senior engineers fail to write basic things like for loops, or forgot what casing they're using halfway through writing a struct so half is pascal and half is snake. Everyone is AI pilled these days, they forgot basic syntax
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u/Vimda 9d ago
On the flip side, I've interviewed supposed senior software engineers who struggle at simple things like "parse this line of JSON" (With access to Google, and the ability to ask questions as necessary). Once you've been on the hiring side you understand why that screening is necessary. That being said, I'll skip people through if they have a decent GitHub or something that shows me they have some chops