It's a real problem, I agree. However, from the point of view of a competent programmer you need to entice them to work for you, not the other way round. The competent one also has to filter out incompetent managers/companies; I'd suggest having FizzBuzz on the interview is one such a nice signal for competent coders to stop bothering and move on.
The equivalent of FizzBuzz for an AWS Architect is setting up a highly available website with a domain name, load balancer, autoscaling group, and the correct subnets, security groups.
Except for the autoscaling group, all of this is basically networking 101. Their “resume” said they were “certified” and had experience. If you can’t get through the easy questions, no need to waste time on the hard questions.
I wouldn't do something like that, but I have sympathy.
If they didn't lie, then they wouldn't have gotten as far as they did. Everybody wants self-starters and people who can learn new things, but the person who already has experience in a laundry list of X, Y, and Z is always going to be preferred before you find out if they are a fraud.
What I did, in order to start doing something new that I didn't have experience in, was (although I didn't exactly plan it this way) to get a job that was explicitly administrative and did not involve programming and start automating it.
I don't think it's right or wrong that some people find IT culture (including interviews) intolerable, but the flow of people out of it shapes it. The more you rely (even unwittingly) on getting and keeping people who are ignorant there's something better out there, the more the ignorant (and/or incurious) shape your organization.
I wouldn’t say they explicitly “lied” that would imply that they were all being intentionally dishonest. I think many of them thought they knew more than they did. I see this not only from people who are just starting out, but also from people working at BigCo.
Putting my developer hat on. I interview a “senior developer”
They say on their resume that they have “used AWS”. Come to find out that all they have done was remoted into some EC2 instances.
They say they have used a certain CI/CD platform. I ask them have they set a pipeline up from scratch. They say no - someone else did it, we are expected to “own the whole stack” including setting up our own pipeline for our microservice. Not a deal breaker. That can be learned in a day. We have plenty of samples they can copy from existing pipelines for almost every scenario.
They put down databases they are experienced with. I give them a scenario and I ask them to model a table schema with it. They can’t do it. They are usually handed a table schema by the “database developers” [sic].
So finally I start working my way up to the actual development and I realize that because they were just a cog in the wheel at BigCorp, they never got a chance to design or write anything from scratch. They never had the joy of creating a brand new repo and doing a git commit with the message “initial commit”. Not horrible, but at a small company, you don’t get any handholding. You’re expected to work directly with the semi-technical product owner or even the end user if you’re senior enough. You are the Directly Responsible Individual.
So now, it’s demo day. The “senior developer” is demoing his code to management who is asking him questions and he melts under pressure or he gets defensible about “his code” and interrupts the CxO.
I want to know his temperament before I hire him.
I know people are going to say it’s not “fair” to expect that from a developer. I’ve had to learn every level of the stack. At some point you can’t call yourself a “senior developer” if you don’t know anything about the underlying infrastructure for your code or how to deploy it.
The next pushback I get is that J don’t remember what’s its like being a junior developer. Six months into my first job I was told to write a distributed data entry system that was going to be used to create a new department in the company. I had to sink or swim by myself - this was over two decades ago.
"Six months into my first job I was told to write a distributed data entry system that was going to be used to create a new department in the company. I had to sink or swim by myself - this was over two decades ago."
This seems to not jibe with the rest of your comment. You were defending not giving someone a chance to dive in, and then you say you had to learn to swim on your own.
Now, perhaps your point is that such a person should have the humility to classify themselves as something less than a senior developer, and then get that experience similar to you.
However, I wonder if the issue is that anybody with more than a couple years of experience is considered to be a pariah if they aren't a senior developer, which goes hand in hand with everybody inflating their experience in a vicious cycle.
Well. I got lucky. I was hired as computer operator the year after I graduated based on an internship the year before at the company - I only accepted to get to $big_city.
I was the only one that knew how to program on staff.
So yeah, taking a job as a computer operator took a lot of humility. But, it was either that or be stuck in a small city doing COBOL programming.
Even today, it took a little humility to go from being the dev lead at one company, turning down a dev lead position at another company to become an IC who is officially under less experience team leads. But, I needed to fill in some gaps in my resume.
Off Topic: I think you are one of the few people on the internet that knows the word is “jibe” not “jive”.
