Well writing trivial code is still a skill, you could have been coding for 10 years and in your day to day work have managed to remove little annoyances and quirks, allowing you to express business logic concisely. I mean we usually don’t go about implementing linked lists and bubble sorts and such.
And this skill gets pushed down, forgotten.
It’s perfectly possible to write excellent battle tested and performant production code for years without encountering any of the stuff you see in the interviews.
And then they go to an interview and someone demands they wiggle out that piece of info from their long _long_ memory, in an unfamiliar env / os / periphery. With a huge time pressure...
Some people are good at that sort of thing, some people are good developers. Doesn’t mean they’re the same people.
And this skill gets pushed down, forgotten.
It’s perfectly possible to write excellent battle tested and performant production code for years without encountering any of the stuff you see in the interviews.
And then they go to an interview and someone demands they wiggle out that piece of info from their long _long_ memory, in an unfamiliar env / os / periphery. With a huge time pressure...
Some people are good at that sort of thing, some people are good developers. Doesn’t mean they’re the same people.