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Software engineering has huge skill variability. C++ is particularly difficult IMO.

I've seen such a large difference in ability on the interviewer side. In a three tier interview process per 100 people:

60 fail the 15 minute phone screen. Just voice, no programming, just describe some OO concepts like encapsulation, interfaces and inheritance.

30 fail the first in house test. This is writing a for loop to reverse a string and describing at a high level how to sort a 2gb file with 1gb of ram. Most fail at the string reversal.

8 fail the second in house test. You draw up an architecture of a basic app. It's open ended.

For every 100 developers about 2 know their stuff well enough to write decent software.




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