This is my favorite part of the whole tech industry circus:
Companies throw out job descriptions demanding:
- “10+ years of React”, which technically is possible now, but only if you were one of the 12 people using React before it was cool
- “Deep expertise” in 14 different frameworks
- Mastery of system design
- Knowledge of Kubernetes, AWS, Terraform, Redis, Kafka, machine learning, microservices, DevOps, and possibly necromancy
- The ability to reverse a binary tree in the middle of a burning building during an earthquake
…yet when you actually visit their website?
It loads like it’s being served off a Raspberry Pi held together with duct tape.
- Their Lighthouse score is in the red
- Their bundle size is obese
- Their Core Web Vitals look like the vitals of a corpse, and interacting with their UI feels like fighting a boss in Dark Souls.
They’re out here rejecting candidates for not using .memo() aggressively enough while their homepage takes 11 seconds to paint the first pixel.
Make it make sense.
If You’re Going to Demand Perfection, Maybe Build Something That Actually Works
Companies love preaching engineering excellence.
But their products?
Their codebases?
Their user experience?
They look like:
- CSS from 2008
- JavaScript written by five different people who never met each other
- Four competing UI libraries
- 9MB of unused React code
- “Temporary fixes” from 2016 still running in production
- Analytics scripts stacked like Jenga blocks
- A backend held together with hope and
console.log()
They demand senior-level skill.
They ship barely-working prototypes.
They want world-class engineering talent.
They build tech like a group project where half the team ghosted.
But yes, absolutely,
please quiz candidates on palindrome algorithms.
That’s clearly the bottleneck in your company.
Companies Hire People Who Know How to Say Buzzwords, Not Write Clean Code
Let’s be honest:
A lot of these companies aren’t hiring the best developers.
They’re hiring people who:
- Know how to talk like an engineer
- Know the correct corporate phrases
- Can survive interviews, not build products
- Fit in socially with team leads
- Mimic senior dev jargon flawlessly
And then these same folks ship code that looks like:
- Inline styles everywhere
- Four nested
.then()chains - Anonymous functions that break debugging
- Zero accessibility
- UI that collapses if you resize the window by 1 pixel
- Pages that load slower than a government website on launch day
But hey, they passed the interview.
Meanwhile, Production Systems Are One Misconfigured Checkbox Away From Disaster
Let’s talk security.
We’re constantly told that only the most elite engineers get hired.
Yet the industry keeps producing headline-level breaches because of things like:
- Misconfigured S3 buckets
- Credentials left in plaintext
- Publicly exposed API keys
- Dashboards without authentication
- Outdated dependencies with known exploits
- Entire databases sitting open like a buffet
This isn’t about blaming individual engineers. It’s about the gap between the image companies project and the reality of their systems.
We’ve built a hiring culture obsessed with theoretical perfection while our production environments look like archaeological sites.
We Have an Industry Gatekeeping High Standards It Doesn’t Even Follow
That’s the truth no one wants to say out loud.
The tech industry:
- Preaches engineering excellence
- Rejects thousands of passionate developers
- Demands flawless knowledge of algorithms
- Encyclopedic framework knowledge
…and then ships code that looks like it was assembled at 3AM by a sleep-deprived committee with no communication skills.
We gatekeep the hell out of entry,
but we definitely don’t gatekeep quality.
The bar is sky-high for candidates.
The bar is on the floor for shipped software.
If companies want to demand god-level talent,
maybe try producing something that doesn’t crash when I scroll too fast.
The Disconnect Is the Real Problem, Not the Developers
This isn’t a rant about “companies didn’t hire me.”
This is a rant about the giant illusion we all keep pretending is normal:
The hiring process and the actual engineering reality are completely disconnected.
Companies demand god-tier engineers,
but their own systems repeatedly reveal:
- lack of fundamentals
- lack of maintainability
- lack of performance practices
- lack of real-world engineering rigor
We don’t need harsher interviews.
We don’t need more gatekeeping.
We don’t need more algorithm trivia.
We need hiring processes that reflect actual engineering needs
instead of a fantasy version of software development.
Because Real Engineering Is About Thinking, Not Trivia
And THAT is the bridge Algomastr exists to fix, without being preachy about it.
Real engineering = understanding how to break down problems, reason through logic, and build maintainable systems.
Not memorizing LeetCode.
Not regurgitating patterns.
Not surviving interrogation.
Algomastr trains the one skill every great engineer actually needs:
Reasoning.
The ability to think, not just react.
No gatekeeping.
No trivia.
No performance theatre.
Just learning how to actually build.
Want to learn real engineering, not interview gymnastics?
That’s literally why I built Algomastr.
If the industry is going to keep pretending the hiring bar equals the engineering bar…
someone has to build tools that teach the skills that actually matter.
And that’s what Algomastr does.
Top comments (2)
lol
As a DevOps engineer, this article felt like reading the autopsy report for half the systems I have inherited. Companies want engineers who can summon Kubernetes storms, optimize everything in real time, and solve algorithm puzzles during natural disasters. Meanwhile, their actual website loads like it is running on a first-generation Raspberry Pi with microSD storage that came free in a cereal box.
They talk about engineering excellence, yet their CI pipeline looks like a scavenger hunt and deployments still start with “pushing to prod, wish me luck”. Their homepage loads slower than my coffee machine warming up.
The hiring bar is orbiting Earth. The software quality bar is relaxing somewhere in the basement. Hilarious and painfully accurate article.