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10 Things That Used to Scream “Senior Engineer.” Now They Scream “Behind.”
The signals flipped. Most engineers haven’t noticed.
I sat in on a system design interview a few weeks ago, shadowing as the second reviewer. The candidate spent six minutes proving he could invert a binary tree from memory, no notes, no hesitation. Clean whiteboard work. Textbook.
He got the offer. Three weeks later, he asked a teammate to write his onboarding script for him because he’d “never really used AI tools much.” Nobody on the panel had thought to ask.
That gap stuck with me. We’re still hiring and promoting on signals that made sense in 2015 and mean almost nothing now. Some of them have quietly become red flags. Here’s what I mean.
1. Memorizing algorithms
Reciting Dijkstra’s on a whiteboard used to prove you belonged in the room. Now it mostly proves you spent a month grinding LeetCode instead of shipping anything. The engineers I trust most can explain a tradeoff in thirty seconds. They couldn’t tell you the exact syntax for a red-black tree rotation, and they don’t care.
