Hmm, on the contrary, I've encountered a bunch of really nice (and not just nice, but generally awesome) people who were very mediocre at the core of their jobs. Usually these are not in technical, software dev roles, but in areas like product management and marketing.
And I don't think this is just my bias, but as much as people love to crap on leetcode-style engineering interviews, they do ensure an objective bar of programming ability: I have never seen someone do great at programming problem interviews who then struggled to program on the job (but they certainly may have had other issues). But the interviews I've sat in on for roles like product management and marketing had less of an objective bar, so it was generally easier for someone with a great personality to get hired in those roles.
>but as much as people love to crap on leetcode-style engineering interviews, they do ensure an objective bar of programming ability
sure, but the further past junior you go, the less programming ability really matters to your day to day job. There's stuff I'm doing on a technical level now that I woulda done just fine 7 years ago in college, but lacking the ability to properly integrate it into a proper PR, communicate with systems/product owners on requirements, iterate on based on customer feedback, and overall maintain with other legacy code in mind. That's gained from experience working on a large codebase, not by hacking away at your ability to find the longest palindrome substring on a whiteboard.
It's inevitable to ask those questions to a junior who lacks work experience, but it's really annoying that I have to study trivia like that some 7+ years into industry. Or that some companies are so paranoid about me answering their trivia quiz offline that they want to compromise my machine's privacy to check on me siting at my computer in thought. I'm gonna be googling documentation on the job anyway, so at least ask me about concepts if you need to probe.
>But the interviews I've sat in on for roles like product management and marketing had less of an objective bar, so it was generally easier for someone with a great personality to get hired in those roles.
I agree, it's hard to gauge those skills, harder to build those skills without having a job first (catch 22) and nearly impossible to assess in any technical test. These are parts of business that can fail even if you do nothing wrong on a technical level, and since society is so blame-first, we never truly assess how much of that is on the market, the individual, or the product.
I do agree it's nice to have something more objective for a technical role. I just think it's a shame that I'm still being asked to implement atoi for a graphics programmer interview. What does that have to do my ability to send data to a GPU?
And I don't think this is just my bias, but as much as people love to crap on leetcode-style engineering interviews, they do ensure an objective bar of programming ability: I have never seen someone do great at programming problem interviews who then struggled to program on the job (but they certainly may have had other issues). But the interviews I've sat in on for roles like product management and marketing had less of an objective bar, so it was generally easier for someone with a great personality to get hired in those roles.