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

It took me a long time to understand that interviewers are often less competent and giving them than they are at coding.

Typically an interview question should be hard enough to test the limits of any candidate. The goal is to see how someone thinks and how honest they are when faced with a technical challenge, not what they were able to memorize.

With that in mind, take heart if the interviews have been sometimes off the mark. Most interviewers were just pulled from some normal day to ask some questions and often unconsciously see it as an opportunity to show off a bit. They have the keys and you need them.

That said, if you do not feel passionate, I would recommend playing around with some other areas like frontend or ML at home, on your own time, and see if any of them click.

The interview process for software engineering has been broken for some time. Don’t give up.

I went through something similar, and ended up failing a bunch of coding interviews. Also I read David Graeber’s book on bull shit jobs, which was really cathartic for me.

I ended up quitting my job, selling my house, and now I’m looking for some property to buy so I can subsistence farm.

I feel your pain.

One thing I would suggest is that programming/software engineering is a broad church. Not everything is large scale backend work. I personally get a lot of satisfaction out of frontend development, and the expectations there seem to be a lot less about hypothetical google-scale nonsense that will never happen in the role, and more "do you know the tech?". Despite what people say/think modern JavaScript/typescript is good to work with and in modern web apps that are 10s of thousands of lines of code there is often a surprising amount of actual "engineering" required.

That said, sometimes just knowing some of the basics might be enough compared to other candidates. E.g. for the tweets in 3 seconds thing, you could talk a lot about horizontal Vs vertical scale and what might mean etc etc and go from there rather than a "sorry I have no idea". You don't always need to be "correct" but just show you are aware of the hypothetical solutions to their hypothetical questions.

Good luck. Hang on in there. I appreciate this can be high stakes for tou, while posting an answer here in a comment is zero stakes.

With over 20 years experience in the industry, and some products I have worked on visible in SuperBowl advertisements, I can honestly say during interviews I can count to potato.

Most recently during a live coding challenge I forgot to you, you know, occasionally run and test the code I was working on, and had one hour to complete.

I can also anecdotally report code challenges seems to have become a lot more common in interviews recently.

And yet, we are still lucky to be in an industry with so many opportunities which pay so well. After several months of interviewing, and failing pretty much every code challenge, while being a programmer over 40, I finally got hired. And can happily report things are going well once again.

My advice is train interviewing. Train not just solving programming puzzles, but also doing it under the gun. That's not easy to train for real, but try to get as close as possible.

And there is no harm in keeping your options open regarding a career change. If not the interview process, but the work itself ever starts to really make you unhappy, it might be time to switch careers.