Tech Interviews Are Broken, and So Is Real-World Software Engineering

Real-World Engineering Is Nothing Like the Interviews

Our Interview System is Fundamentally Broken

Having been part of multiple big tech companies and having interviewed at many more, one thing is clear to me - our interview system is deeply flawed.

Time and again, I’ve observed that many interviewers walk into the process with a pre-decided mindset. Some have already made up their minds to reject the candidate, often due to personal biases or ego issues. Many won’t even give you the benefit of the doubt, regardless of how well you perform.

First, there’s the LeetCode delusion. Interviewers casually throw "hard" problems at candidates, but here’s the catch - they themselves looked at the solution beforehand and now believe it’s "easy." Just because something makes sense after seeing the solution doesn’t mean it’s easy to come up with. Some problems often require deep understanding, pattern recognition, and sharp DSA intuition. Expecting candidates to crack them in 15 minutes is just absurd.

Then, there’s the ridiculous system design expectations. What’s up with this obsession over designing Twitter, Instagram, or some billion-user-scale system in 40 minutes? Let’s be real - most of the time, candidates have just memorized common designs and trade-offs, because nobody builds Twitter or Instagram from scratch with MySQL and Redis in a rushed whiteboard session. Yet, this flawed approach rewards rote memorization over actual problem-solving ability.

This whole system is broken. It filters out great engineers while rewarding those who can cram the right interviewing skill. It needs a serious overhaul.

These questions don’t evaluate your actual software development skills; they merely test how well you can play the interview game - how polished you sound, how confidently you throw around technical jargon, and how convincing you are as an "interviewer’s interviewer.

Real-world system design is iterative, messy, and dependent on business needs - none of which are captured in these interview sessions.

---

The Reality of Software Engineering

Real-world software engineering is a completely different ball game. You’re not designing Redis or MySQL from scratch, nor are you crafting an entire news feed algorithm from the ground up. Instead, you’re working within an already complex, barely understood system, building on top of layers of existing tech debt.

Most of your work? Shipping features fast, which often means resorting to hacks just to get things done. In reality, your tasks look more like:

• Transforming one API response format into another because a frontend team needs it in a slightly different structure.

• Adding a new field to an existing protobuf/gRPC schema while making sure it doesn’t break older clients.

• Refactoring a function that’s been working fine for years - not because it needs fixing, but because your team decided to standardize naming conventions.

• Writing a migration script to update a deprecated feature flag that no one even remembers why it was added in the first place.

• Convincing the infra team to increase a rate limit because a business team suddenly wants real-time insights—only for them to later realize they don’t actually need it.

• Writing documentation that sounds technical and impressive, even if an intern could have done the actual work - because that’s how you get promoted.

• Rewriting unit tests just to satisfy some arbitrary coverage percentage, knowing full well that these tests won’t catch any real-world failures.

And when performance review season comes? It’s not about what you built but how well you sell yourself - crafting the perfect narrative, gathering “impact” data points, and making sure you don’t look like just another replaceable cog in the machine.

90% of what you build today won't even be used in a couple of years - 90% of the time. All those fancy design patterns you learned? Completely pointless in the grand scheme of things. Tech debt piles up, nobody refactors, and when a project is finally deemed unsalvageable, it gets rewritten from scratch anyway.

The harsh reality is that nobody really cares about code quality when the pressure is on. When deadlines are looming and the fire alarms are blaring, your PR will get approved without a second glance - no matter how messy the code is. At the end of the day, it's all about shipping fast, not writing "beautiful" code that nobody will maintain anyway.

And that’s just how things work in practice. When thousands of engineers are working on the same codebase, true efficiency is almost impossible - everyone has their own way of doing things, and you just have to fit in and get things shipped.

It’s about fitting into an imperfect system and getting things done.

Sometimes, you optimize for efficiency. Other times, you just push things out as fast as possible because that’s what the situation demands. The real skill? Adaptability. If you’re too rigid, you’re not a good engineer—you’re just someone who gets stuck arguing over the "right way" while others actually get things done.

Good engineers adapt. Great engineers deliver.

The hiring process is broken. The work itself is messy. The sooner you accept this reality, the better you’ll navigate the industry. It’s not about who codes the best - it’s about who understands the game.