I make a judgement call - either I end the interview immediately or skip most of the rest of the interview, let them think they made it all the way through the interview and say that we will get back to them with a decision later. When I end it immediately they usually take it badly but these are times that I just can’t justify wasting any more time on them. The bad reactions run the normal gamut of bad human reactions: angry, sad, indifferent, humor, etc.

We are a smaller org and hire occasionally for roles that are most suitable for early career applicants.

We always get several applicants with 10-20 years of experience who have programming projects on their resume or described in their cover letters.

But in our (very minimal) technical evaluations, lots of these candidates can't do anything at all. No coding, psueudo-code, nothing.

Usually, it turns out they have been really doing light IT work for years - using reporting tools, maintaining little scripts, even just some Excel jockeying. But they still think of themselves as software engineers.

My gut feeling is that lots of these candidates could learn (relearn?) to code, but have spent years not coding.

I don't have the numbers in front of me, but I would guess that the majority of these types of candidates (10-20 years of experience) that apply to our roles can't code in an interview situation and haven't been programming recently.

It is definitely not all of the experienced candidates who fit that profile. The few very experienced candidates we get who can code are often excellent but are looking for salaries well beyond our range.