[AmericanBlarney]

SWE manager here, at multiple well known companies, and this isn't how it's worked at any of them. Some of them I've had to do leetcode interviews while at others, it was important to know aubergine who could vouch for your work. Could just be me but I've never experienced the "I just have a good feeling about this guy" supply t if interview.

[willcipriano]

"He goes golfing with Jerry" isn't going to eliminate bias, but you can absolutely get jobs in management on that basis. I don't think any of my managers could do a leetcode hard off hand, I may have worked at the wrong companies.

[Frost1x]

I assume your CIO also took a LC interview as well. I believe parent's point is that this front line hazing commanding competency is moot when orgs are hierarchical in nature and you needent step far up from a leaf node in an org chart to find someone hired on "just trust me, here's where I worked and what I did."

At some point a technical interview rightfully doesn't make sense for a role (at least by itself), some transition up the chain typically needs someone who trusts a technically competent person below them and uses their advice. These transition layers really require someone with business acumen and technical acumen which are often unicorns, not in these positions and if they are, are not in a position to command change upwards. You need to really understand business direction, financials, market pressure and so on while also understanding all the technical challenges. You also need people who don't override your assessments frequently.

What usually happens though, from my experience, is you have an interface in the hierarchy where someone above understands a touch of tech but is primarily business and human management focused and a person below them knows a little business but is primarily technical. The bias will typically ignore, override, or pressure the technical challenges based on business focus in this structure. That bias comes from someone who didn't take LC and doesn't understand the technology or problems often at all.

There's this weird mindset in the software industry that by hazing one another and pushing for only the most skilled engineers at leaf nodes of an org, we can command change upwards or at least make our lives better by filtering out incompetent teammates that make our lives more difficult. Meanwhile, none of this matters to me in the big picture if someone is technically incompetent up the chain yet is pushing technical decisions either directly or indirectly that makes life miserable for very technically competent staff. You can have the most competent staff in the world with incompetent leadership. In a best case they're hands off and have a nice gig where their department makes them look good while they do nothing. In a worst case, they get actively involved in areas they shouldn't.

One may argue this only happens in bad orgs, and that could be correct. In that case, the bad orgs vastly outnumber the good orgs. I don't think this is the case though. Technology is typically to some degree considered a cost center for any business, even technology focused companies (its a cost center until certain efforts prove their value). It's a means to an end to keep afloat and make money so business interests will always override technical interests and this is very often embedded in the very power structure of a given org. Someone above you didn't LC, someone just trusted them during their interview, and now they tell you what to do. Maybe they're competent and didn't need to, maybe they're not.

I have a good friend who was a world class (quantum) chemist well recognized in his field and a technologist by heart in an S&P 100 scale org. He held the role essentially akin to a Fellow or Senior Fellow at a place like Google in a Fortune 100 chemical industry leader (the next step up would be something like VP research IIRC). He was frequently overriden by VPs that had no inkling of the science or technology needed to accomplish the baseline innovation business that made them money. So no matter how competent he and his staff may have been, someone who didn't care or was incompetent around the issues commanded decisions that effected him and every department he lead. This is in an org where someone doing real daily scientific and technical groundwork was able to interact at executive levels. Some of this leadership probably couldn't identify lead on a periodic table if their life depended on it (and they might not need to, assuming they listen to people who can), yet to get to the role just below them, you needed to be a leader in your discipline.

[AmericanBlarney]

Irrelevant - a CIO's job isn't to be a hands-on coder, it's to set a strategy and manage an organization. Companies do a good but if due diligence on that, which is why it's really hard to break into the executive ranks - you have to find an opportunity that can grow into leading a large team because no one will hire you to do so if you haven't before.

Purely by chance, the last place I worked that had a CIO title, my LOB CIO probably would have had a good chance at passing a Leetcode interview, despite managing 10,000+ people.