Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role
I find the coding thing interesting as well, in part because there is coding and there is coding.<p>I suspect it is the difference between &quot;coding ability&quot; and &quot;coding fluency.&quot; In the former a candidate can apply known patterns of a give language to a problem and with just a few searches on StackOverflow get it working. A person who has code fluency can create the algorithm in the language of your choice, pretty much on the spot.<p>In the music world you meet people who can play a song on the keyboard that is note perfect, but they can&#x27;t transpose it into a different key. Its the difference between playing the keyboard and using the keyboard to express a musical concept.<p>Can you speak a language if all you have done is memorize an extensive phrase book? Yes, are you fluent? No.<p>The number of candidates who really understand the nature of coding and so they can quickly adapt to any idiomatic language is still quite small in my experience.