Ask HN: Should I quit the field of software development?

I have been in the field for a few years, mostly doing backend development.

I'll preface this by saying this field has never been my passion, just a profession I like.

I have been having an extremely difficult time with getting and clearing interviews. Screening rounds have become at least 2-3 hour long algorithm solving sessions which can range from dumb (requiring me to know some syntax that I am not allowed to look up) to extremely demanding.

System design rounds require me to solve problems that the top engineers in the world spend months on. One question I was asked was "How do you make sure that a celebrity's tweet reaches all of her followers in less than 3 seconds?". I had no idea, I have never handled that kinda scale. In fact most of my work experience is kinda vanilla and boring, so I generally have nothing much to draw on or much to talk about.

Also, I'm not talking about FAANGs here. I never even applied to them. I apply to basic CRUD development roles, half of them entry level, and even there, the grilling has become intense, if I even get an interview.

I haven't even applied to jobs for weeks now, because in interviews I feel like I'm getting humiliated and I want to apologize and end them half-way.

I'm sorry if this is incoherent.

I'm sure the problem is me, since other people are doing fine. I need to draw a line and figure out some good indicators of when I should quit this industry, and anyone here who could give a few pointers on that, I would be thankful. I don't want to throw more time and resources into an industry where baseline expectations are something I can't/won't reach.

What are you passionate about? Find out what that is and see if they can use engineering at all. You’d be surprised at what you will learn to do the thing you love. We all have things about engineering that we don’t necessarily like but that isn’t any reason to give up. Keep trying, I hear the market is hard right now due to some type of pandemic.

I don't have recruiting experience in the field on either side in the past 5 years and likely am in a different country anyway, but from what you wrote I'd tend to believe that your selection of companies you applied to was a bit unlucky/wrong. Try smaller companies that aren't 100% IT focused so they have no pressure to hire rock stars to fix their issues with their 800 mediocre software engineers.

Sorry for going offtopic

"How do you make sure that a celebrity's tweet reaches all of her followers in less than 3 seconds?"

Looks like the interviewer has atleast read the first chapter of "Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems"

If you read and understand the above book, I am reasonably sure that you can crack most of the system design interviews.

Rule #1 of software industry: Never judge the work nature by the interview. Cracking interviews is a different skill which is completely different from what you need to solve real problems for real people.

If you quit now, it means the gatekeepers have won and I don’t think these gatekeepers as a good enough reason for someone to quit. As to when to know to quit: there will come a time when you will burn out. When writing code doesn’t excite you as much as it did before. When you find yourself in this zone for say 3 weeks in a row, take a break and try something else. There’s a fifty fifty chance you’ll comeback and about the same odds that you’ll find something else interesting too.