An alarming portion of people in software industry can't code. Leetcode or otherwise. This was shocking for me when I started interviewing but it is what it is. Most people just can't code.

I don't like brainteasers and never propose anything remotely intimidating. After all, interview is a stressful affair as it is there is no need to make it any more so. But I'll never hire a person who can't write a few lines of code on demand either.

I so wish I could contradict you, but in my own experience good coding skills, even after years of experience, seem to be a rare gift.

It's because the amount of story telling and wordiness in an interview is often inversely proportional to the amount of output produced by that engineer.

I've learned the hard way not to hire the big talkers. Doing is much more important than saying.

Having been on the "other side" of the table, I can kinda answer this. In my experience, the interviewees who talk too much are the bullshitters (in fact that's a red flag). They usually can't code for nuts. The ONLY way to separate the wheat is to give them a problem and then see how they navigate it.

Those who can talk AND code are worth their weight in gold.

Talking too much can be a sign of nervousness, or maybe because interviewee read a an article advising to keep no pauses. That's not necessary a bad indicator. It's when you are fed with long, but barely related stories instead of answers on concise questions then you can suggest bs is being produced.

Being able to code well is more easily measured than "softer" skills.

If you can't code, it's immediately obvious.

Being a good HR person or Inclusivity Officer is much more subjective.

Engineers are treated like robots.

And yet, the majority seems to oppose unionizing despite calling themselves tech workers. Puzzling, how often people act against their own interests.

It's because the top earners make obscene levels of money, and a union might disrupt that. So you have a situation where a company might only lose lower performers to unionization, which they can afford to handle.

Partly true. Unions are a way to balance power disparity between Owner and Worker.

Currently, tech mostly has more work to be done than engineers to do said work - so the balance is tipped toward the individual. (At least in the US). Once that balance is tipped the other way, the value of Unions will go up dramatically.

That seems to be mostly a US thing. Programmers there seems to be more libertarian than elsewhere, and unions are seen as, if not an embodiment of Big Bad Communism, at least a recognition that we’re not as independent as we might would like. Here in France we’re hardly opposed to unions. We’re lazy in not joining for sure, and some do say they’re useless, but almost no one would dare suggest they’re bad.

By the way I believe the difference between our ways of thinking goes beyond such politics, and influence our technical decisions as well. Someone who’s all about negative freedom (lack of restrictions) and distrusting authorities (most notably governments), is I think more likely to prefer permissive licences and dynamic typing.

Conversely, those who prefer static typing are more likely to see programming as a branch of applied maths, accept more immediate loss of freedom for a greater good, and believe that a government can be trustworthy even if they may not like their current one.

It's not a statement of fact that we know whether a union for software engineers would be good for these workers. The jury is still out.

> And yet, the majority seems to oppose unionizing despite calling themselves tech workers.

I find this an interesting statement because it equivocates self-identification with a socio-economic class (Workers) with a banal statement of fact ("I am employed doing work in a certain field"). The identification with Workers as a class is a political-philosophical stance, whether in the old school Labor vs. Management sense, or Marx's Proletariat vs. Bourgeoisie or some other.

Is it really so difficult to believe that workers in the second sense (the set of people providing technical expertise for money) have a diversity of views on any subject?

> Puzzling, how often people act against their own interests.

Perhaps. As humans we can all be short-sighted. It is also possible that the evils of working in the tech field are somewhat exaggerated. We are paid well relative to the median, we get to work in conditions that would have been considered luxurious across most of human history (temperature controlled indoors, without physical labor), and can pick our level of engagement (working at high finance or in an early startup is trading high risk and stress for the promise of a better payout, working in established businesses allows for fewer hours and less stress).