The uncomfortable patterns I kept seeing over and over again

1. The Résumés Were Glorious -- The Code Was a Mess

I went into my first batch of interviews expecting battle-hardened engineers with clean code and sharp problem-solving skills. What I got was... chaos.

People with glittering résumés -- FAANG internships, big-name bootcamps, impressive GitHub graphs -- were unable to reverse a linked list or explain how a hash map works under the hood.

They could talk about scaling microservices across distributed environments, but couldn't write a loop without an off-by-one error.

That's when I realized: résumés can be theater. They reflect how good someone is at appearing technical, not necessarily at solving problems with code.

2. They Memorized Patterns, Not Principles

Here's the most common failure pattern I saw: candidates trying to regurgitate memorized LeetCode patterns like cheat codes.

Ask them a novel variation of a problem, and they freeze. If their exact memorized solution didn't fit, they had no idea how to adapt.

This is what I call algorithm karaoke -- they can sing along to the song if you play it, but they can't compose anything new.

Real engineering is 90% thinking, 10% typing. If you don't understand fundamentals -- data structures, complexity analysis, memory layout, design trade-offs -- your brain short-circuits the moment the problem stops matching your flashcards.

3. They Never Practiced Writing Production Code

Many candidates could hack together a solution that technically worked, but the code looked like a crime scene.

No structure, no naming conventions, no tests, no separation of concerns. Just a blob of logic barely duct-taped together.

They treated the code challenge like a race, not a system that might live for years and need to be understood by other humans.