This is going to be a controversial opinion. The quality of your average tech worker has completely nosedived in the last 10-15 years. All these huge companies wanted more products, more marketshare, more money, etc. They needed more people to pull this off. They started lowering hiring standards across the board because there just weren't enough people in tech. Simultaneously, a huge portion of the world saw tech sa…
The awkward part is that most people I know that have been at these companies for 10+ years feel like they couldn't pass the current hiring bar.
1. memorizing some 50-200 or so domain-specific general patterns which problem solutions will tend to follow, so you can solve an arbitrary leetcode medium in under 20 minutes time — a skill that has almost nothing to do with the plumbing and product work most tech-workers engage in on a day to day basis, and
2. Speak at length and extemporaneously on arbitrary from-scratch system design problems — a skill which, while sometimes important, is a skill which most engineers that aren’t working at a startup won’t usually exercise more than once or twice a year, as the ratio of work on “systems already designed” to “systems needing new designs” will overwhelmingly skew towards pre-existence.
When your hiring process and day job are so thoroughly dissociated and unrelated to each other, it’s not a surprise current workers who aren’t actively studying for a job change couldn’t pass it.