Today I had to interview a "Senior Software Engineer" for the new India offices for the company I work for. To say the interview was a disaster was an understatement.

I asked a question about the engineers project that he clearly stated he had done on his resume. No detail other than repeating back to me what he put on his resume. I said OK.. but can you give me any more detail.. he said basically quoted a bit more of his resume..

The coding exercise - complete shitshow - We presented pretty straightforward request - to parse a few lines of log data and turn it into a JSON object. After a few minutes he said "I do not know how to do this.. next question please?"

I ended the interview.

Next interview was even worse. I asked the candidate to expand on something he stated delivery on in his resume. He said "oh I did not work on that".. And didn't have a laptop available to do the coding part of the interview.

I was furious.. a complete waste of my time and my team's time.

Later that morning I told one of the members of my team - a young woman from India - what happened.. she said "I was afraid you would run into that.. 'Software Engineers' in India do not actually write code. They do after hours tech support work." I can only guess that they reason they want to be called "Software Engineers" is for the title rather than what they are which is "technical support analyst".

Mean while US corporations lay off US engineers by the thousands. I'd laugh if it wasn't so awful

#jobs #india #software