Engineers who got hired pre-pandemic and are now back on the market — how are you actually holding up with the current interview process?

Posted by OkChance3303@reddit | ExperiencedDevs | View on Reddit | 53 comments

Not talking about new grads or people who’ve been job hopping every 2 years and staying sharp. I mean the engineers who landed a solid role around 2017–2019, put their head down, shipped real products for 5–7 years, and then got caught in the post-boom layoffs.
These people built actual systems. They’ve debugged production outages at 2am, mentored junior devs, navigated legacy codebases that would make most people quit on day one. And now they’re sitting across from a 25-year-old asking them to implement a segment tree under time pressure on a shared screen.
A few things have genuinely changed since the last time a lot of these folks interviewed:
The bar shifted. A senior engineer who interviewed at Google in both 2021 and 2024 noted that LeetCode Hard problems — which he assumed were never asked — have now become the norm. That’s not a small jump.
The volume is brutal. At least 127,000 workers at U.S.-based tech companies were laid off in 2025 alone, and a lot of them are strong engineers flooding the same application pools.
The format itself has gotten more adversarial. System design rounds that used to be reserved for senior engineers now start at mid-level, and senior candidates are getting Staff-level scope questions. The goalposts moved on everyone while some people weren’t looking.
And the kicker is — engineers who have built incredible real-world applications are struggling to clear interviews because they haven’t looked at graph theory in a decade. That’s not a skills gap. That’s a preparation gap for a very specific performance.
I’ve seen people with 20 years of experience describe spending sleepless nights grinding LeetCode just to get 5 rejections in 4 months. Not because they’re bad engineers. Because the interview is essentially a separate skill from the job.
So genuinely curious — for those of you who’ve been through this:
• How big of a gap did you feel between what you knew and what was being tested?
• Did your years of real-world experience actually help you at any point in the process, or did it feel irrelevant?
• What did you actually have to do to get back in interview shape?
• And honestly — did landing eventually feel worth it, or did the process change how you see the industry?
No judgment either way. Just feel like this story doesn’t get told enough compared to the new grad struggle.

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ziksy9@reddit

25+ yoe eng. Went from 10y at a faang (individually making and saving millions yoy, leading projects from greenfield to cash, etc, ) to an emailed layoff a few years ago.

Consulted a bit like in a past life, grinded leetcode, distributed architecture, public GitHub projects, OSS contribs, mock interviews, etc for months.

Started applying with an immaculate resume and impressive background. Hardly got any bites. Aced all kinds of interviews that I did get, and for the dreaded "yeah... Not you" emails for months.

Spent more time grinding, connecting, and interviewing, and finally got 2 decent offers after about a year of trying (and financially drying), and accepted one.

Been there about a year and a half, and it's been not terrible, but lately people across the org are dropping like flies. Long term, short term, doesn't matter.

Best advice I can give - Always be interviewing.

Even if you're happy where you are, keep your options open. It only takes a single email to not making rent next month or draining your retirement early to keep the wheels greased.

Interview processes suck. They exist in the past, designed by recruiters, implemented by engineering managers, and stats (not quality) by directors.

If some big company started making it a costume contest with recited Shakespeare programming puns, every other company would follow.

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skg1979@reddit

Your story makes it seem like there's no chance for the rest of us. If someone ex faang takes a year to land a new role, imagine how much harder it is for the rest of us.

How were you financially dry after working 10 years at faang?

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superide@reddit

Yeah it's making me hard to figure out how to crack my problem situation if I went from okay at getting interviews but bad at offers to not getting interviews at all. Even random messages from recruiters have become more rare to me.

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ziksy9@reddit

3 kids, wife, had some savings, retirement, stocks, crypto, no property. After a year, I cashed a bit and ate the tax, I think it was 2 years between being off and getting a new job. Even cutting everything back living in the valley costs money. I stupidly cashed the stocks as they hit as a "bonus" during my tenure as needed to compensate living "decently".

Spent 2 years of bleeding it all dry while trying to land a gig. Previous years, I'd have 4 offers before I got home the same day.

Just goes to show the whole interview process is a sham. It's not that you can't get hired without an extensive background, it's that it's so broken that it doesn't work that way.

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unconceivables@reddit

How would you change the interviews?

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x-jhp-x@reddit

"every other company would follow" hmm. I, for one, would buck that kind of conformity with Shakespearian "nice" questions.

Antoak@reddit

Can we start handing out week long bans for people who use LLMs to write posts?

seinfeld4eva@reddit

Nice conversation-starter written by AI

ImpossibleEbb6862@reddit

I don’t think it actually matters if a post has AI phrasing. Complaining about this actually does a lot more to decrease sub quality than the post itself.

I don’t care if a person used AI to help write a post. We all use it everyday to help write things. Why should this be any different? What I care about is if this is a real person or not. If you have reason to believe that, it’s a valid complaint to raise. But considering how popular AI assisted writing is, picking out phrasing isn’t enough to suspect that.

ironymouse@reddit

This phrasing convinced me

That’s not a skills gap. That’s a preparation gap for a very specific performance.

yes, textbook AI

johnpeters42@reddit

"How could they make AI worse?"

sound of blank lines between paragraphs being deleted

"They found a way."

illustrious_feijoa@reddit

Come on OP, of you're going to use AI slop to karma farm, at least try to make it less obvious.

nullbyte420@reddit

"Genuinely curious" is such a typical final paragraph all over tech reddit

haskell_rules@reddit

I'm hiring aggessively right now. After you pass the HR screen, we have one video call interview - we talk for an hour. I ask about what you worked on, what your roles were, what kind of experiences you've had. No algorithm problems, no trivia. The last 20 minutes of the call, I tell you if I think you might be a fit in a certain role and describe what we do and what I envision you would be doing.

After the call, I talk with the team and we make a decision immediately. We tell HR to draft an offer or send a rejection within 30 minutes of the interview. They get back to you within a day or two.

If you accept the offer, there's a stipulation that you won't be PIPed in the first 6 months. You will just be fired. At-will employment state.

We have not experienced any reduction on in average candidate quality with this method compared to the previous method of multiple interviews, skills test, and interview panels. I can only think of 1 person that was fired during the trial period in 5 years, for gross nonperformance.

lawrencek1992@reddit

This is what I’ve done a lot of times. Or some trivial coding problem I don’t need to study for. Mostly I’m just talking about work I’ve done and it’s pretty relaxed.

OkChance3303@reddit (OP)

This sounds awful

Are you serious? This is so much more chill?

eightnotes5@reddit

Not if you’ve done the things you describe in your post.

Complex_Community458@reddit

You can definitely get away with that if you only interview people who have already worked at companies with lengthy multi-stage interview processes. Essentially those guys did the vetting for you and you just need to do the culture fit part.

The company I work for has a number of engineering teams/disciplines also, we build hardware, embedded software, test teams, etc, so we do have the benefit of being able to steer people towards roles they can succeed in.

HoratioWobble@reddit

This right here, the companies that insist on tests, multiple interviews etc are always afraid to actually just try this, I found the same years ago it doesn't end up in poorer quality candidates.

Fair play for actually testing your assumptions.

chat_not_gpt@reddit

This is very refreshing. Good for you. This is the way!

u/haskell_rules: "No algorithm problems, no trivia." Just a short and simple three hour lecture on category theory followed by lunch with discussions over Curry.

dacydergoth@reddit

But are you isomorphic over your monads?

Motor_Fudge8728@reddit

Isomorphic functors is all you need

PartyParrotGames@reddit

Name checks out.

edgen22@reddit

> If you accept the offer, there's a stipulation that you won't be PIPed in the first 6 months. You will just be fired. At-will employment state.

This sounds strange to me, like unnecessarily hostile? It's my understanding that in the US employers can and frequently fire employees without any warning. So it's not really a "stipulation" as much as it is a reminder of that uncomfortable reality. PIPs seem rare and often have no intention of "succeeding" anyway.

It sounds like you're actually doing interviews very well / have a good intuition for it, and you could totally drop the threat of "no PIPs for 6 months" to avoid causing your new employees to question company culture on day 1.

Just my opinion! Sounds like everything is going well for you though so perhaps this is a really minor note in the grand scheme of things.

The_Real_Slim_Lemon@reddit

It’s pretty standard where I am, it’s just called “probation”

We have to disclose that since it's a deviation from the formal HR policy for full time employees. I do make it clear that we only intend to invoke that in egregious cases.

almarcTheSun@reddit

I always had my suspicions that the leetcode-style interview with ten rounds does not meaningfully increase your candidate quality while massively increasing hiring costs. Any senior engineer who's not a complete tool will be able to roughly identify the technical abilities of a candidate unless they are an egregiously good liar, in which case you will be allowed to simply fire them for being unqualified and lying on their resume.

archialone@reddit

What do you ask? What do you talk about?

Good for you, I feel like this used to be the norm. You could go into an interview and meet with a few folks over the course of a few hours and get an answer that day. This is how normal people interact. Software engineers like to make things more complicated than they should be. Emulate FAANG like a buncha wannabes. It doesn't work well for most scenarios

Spiritual-Matters@reddit

Location, YOE requested, primary language(s), and salary range?

PushHaunting9916@reddit

One of the biggest problems today isn't just that interviews have gotten harder, but that the industry's culture has shifted. Tech used to be a more open, fun environment driven by geeks and nerds who loved diving deep into the technical weeds.

Today, the landscape is highly corporate, and there is a massive disconnect between day-to-day work and the interview process itself. For veterans of that older era, their technical expertise runs incredibly deep.

Yet, if you don't tailor your answers to match the interviewer's specific and often superficial "101" understanding of a topic, you will fail, despite possessing advanced "202" or "303" knowledge gained from books or from actually building or maintaining those systems.

poralexc@reddit

This was a major theme in my last job search.

Things improved drastically once I learned to censor anything too technical from recruiter types and save it for the later rounds with engineers.

I know exactly what you mean, but it's also getting increasingly rare to get resumes come across my desk from veterans like that. I've got one contractor on my team that fits that description, and I had to find him on Discord and recruit him. I wish I could find more.

Could you expand? How would those resumes look like?

valadil@reddit

Hired in 2019. Still there but feeling ready to move on. I keep trying to update my interview skills and noping out because it’s too overwhelming. If I were laid off I could treat interviewing as a full time job. I dont see how to do that while also managing a full time job, short of quiet quitting and hoping I land something before they notice.

tonjohn@reddit

Laid off in March with 6mo severance. Praying the bubble pops before I have to interview in earnest! 🙏

pennyclip@reddit

Having the responsibilities of all the people getting laid off land on you, and trying to find the time to prep skills for interviews you may not use at all and most definitely will not use in the job is pretty pretty rough.

I had a few and the live coding was just diabolical. I did okay, but someone with the space to grind these problems will outshine me. No discussions about work or what Ive built or my personality, here's 5 leetcode mediums solve them in 45 minutes.

Best of luck to us all.

HakX@reddit

Ban this AI shitpost

Yes, interviewing is not a solved problem. Plenty of companies have tons of strategies to attempt to figure out if an employee will be successful, and no one has yet found a solution. I think most engineers dislike a number of things about the hiring process, but most engineers also can't suggest anything better.

Effective_Hope_3071@reddit

Why would they suggest better? The interview gating is a direct boost to salaries. Anyone who has passed it and has survivorship bias thinks there's nothing to change and if you can build real product but your brain fucking hates time pressured algo puzzles then you don't deserve it.

You appear to misunderstand the reason for interviews. Devs interview people they are interested in working with. Devs aren't asking hard questions to ensure job security & to ensure that their company cannot hire anyone. We, as developers, have tasks and deadlines. We need people to do the work, and we want to hire people to do the work with us.

Some companies ask much harder questions than other companies, and that is because they have applicants who can answer the questions. Plenty of people have also been tracking what is a strong vs weak signal in relation to how someone will perform on the job, and that is constantly still being tweaked and experimented with.

First, you are making assumptions here. There are absolutely companies where you are directly or indirectly interviewing your/colleague's replacement.

Second, the problem isn't that some questions are easy and others are hard. Obviously, people who can answer harder questions probably know more. The problem is that those questions (like leetcode style interviews) are usually so disconnected with the actual work that they don't meaningfully tell you whether this person has good real-world skills. A fresh graduate knows how to write a recursive function and an experienced developer might not. Simply because for most people on most jobs, most of those pure theoretic algorithms never come up.

I've done plenty of interviews where I've been asked to reverse linked lists, traverse graphs and implement binary search or whatever other algorithm they ask.

I was interviewing for front-end and CI/CD positions...

ninetofivedev@reddit

The actual work these days is muxing 12 terminal sessions and providing just enough context to the LLM for it to complete the task.

Yes, we're a joke.

Idea-Aggressive@reddit

Being hired between 2017-2019 doesn’t mean what you are claiming. You need to prove it. A consultant with multiple 6 -18 months experience across many gigs in the past 8 years most likely have been exposed to a greater number of interesting problems and solutions.

7 years, and then got caught in the post-boom layoffs

There have been massive tech layoffs every year since 2022.

Some of y’all live in your own worlds and your own narratives.

Jolly-joe@reddit

14 YoE. Not laid off but I've been looking for a new role because it feels like my company is circling the drain. I've managed to snag a few interviews but locked up from nerves during the live leet code sessions despite working through about 75 problems, mostly mediums with some hards.

It sucks. I'm burned out. I don't have the mental capacity to study for these interviews when I'm already working 60+ hrs a week. Plus I get so nervous because it feels like winning the lottery every time you make it past the ATS layer.

SoftwareEngineer2026@reddit

Real-world experience has helped with system design since you can discuss the named system instead of the abstract concept. However yeah it’s annoying to grind Leetcode. You mention graphs and I blanked on a medium graph problem for example. However I’d shy away from calling it “brutal” since I still get callbacks.

kylife@reddit

7-8 YOE two big media companies and worked at Coinbase in between and got laid off during “crypto winter” post pandemic.

Currently looking at this is the hardest job market I’ve ever experienced.