That said of course the modern coding interview is I think only very loosely correlated with quality.
Of course, every business likes to pretend they're the top and can only hire top talent.
Besides all that, mediocre literally means average. You (collective) should be fine with average and stop overloading terms making general life more difficult than it needs to be.
I have no clue how the term 'mediocre' has come to mean essentially bottom of the barrel proficiency that is still the minimum hiring level quality. The top dog companies can be elitist, but when the company is "MegaCrudSoftware Inc.", it's just plain narcissism. Many Reddit/HN posters exude this in the individual sense and believe they're god's gift to the keyboard and it's just as narcissistic.
Edit: and that similarly goes for how you define mediocre; I think my toptalents are your mediocre. I'll have your mediocre please!
Interesting, I associate 'latest framework' more with trying to keep the monotonous job interesting (or perhaps misguided attempt at keeping sharp) than with 'new challenges'...
That {something} can be web, embedded, ML, etc... it doesn't matter.
The problem is twofold.
First, your skills in {something} are appreciating more than the other skills. If you're a web dev trying to transition to embedded, the skills as a web dev will let you get a more senior spot than going back to a lower experience embedded.
As a $150k/y web dev, would you rather go to $175k/y sr web dev or $125k/y embedded?
It's not that its hard - just that the skills that you've invested time into don't have value and you're going to need to go back to being "just" a competent programmer who needs to learn the domain for anything you switch to.
Secondly, there's the "why are you switching" problem.
If you are switching from web to embedded, the question will come up "why are you switching to a different domain." When that question gets asked, many candidates exhibit a more whimsical or capricious nature of just wanting to do something different. At which point the interviewer is looking at "competent, but likely to leave in a year or two because they got bored" vs "less experienced, but interested in the domain." The second candidate is probably a better choice.
The way to solve that is the personal project and demonstrate that you're interested in the domain at more than a "I'm bored with what I currently do."
Are they mediocre developers? Yeah, absolutely. But under the right guidance they can absolutely be valuable to a company, and our turnover tends to be low because we have a 9-5 culture. It’s less about being a mediocre company versus a company that can’t compete for talent on price, so our talent strategy is to keep it a nice place to work so people want to stay.
The mediocre app/system quality and performance and mediocre security for customer and business data that results creates a (sub-)mediocre customer experience.
I have seen enough software projects that certainly didn't fail because the devs lacked ability, there was always another reason and mainly that is leadership not knowing about the problem they try to solve.
A bit of an exception might be more artistic topics like video games. Here marketing and chance play a larger role than management.
Sure, maybe you do cutting edge research, here ability is important again, but that is truly exceptional.
That said, I don't think it is hard to get a job currently.
What's so bad about... mediocrity? For obvious statistical reasons, most companies, most jobs, and most people are mediocre (or worse).
That's assuming companies exist on a one dimensional spectrum. The more prevailing wisdom is that companies will be mediocre or bad at many things, and good at a couple of particular things, and those couple of things are what make the company viable. This is the essence of a "unique selling point".
But to the point: most companies don't need great developers. Nowdays most medium sized businesses employ some tech staff, but IT is not core to their business.
And if someone mediocre ends up being able to do the job, the company's management may face the fact that they're just a bunch of lame yuppies spending their life in the office to make someone else richer, not changing the world/making the world a better place/any other bullshit eaten from the trashcan of ideology (sniffff).
Well, perceived value rather than actual value. Which might be pretty much equivalent in a field like Sales where it's easy to track figures, but much harder in fields like software.
And in the end, most people are near the centre of the bell-curve of talent, and still manage to produce plenty of value for themselves and their employer. Not everybody has to be extraordinary to keep the society ticking, and the perception that we should always be excellent isn't just counter-productive, but actively harmful (see what magazines did to people's body image).
Nothing, if company managers would admit it.
Instinctively, they know it. The old cult of management-as-a-profession believes that by skillfully directing the activities of replaceable cogs, a company's managers can achieve outsized results.
But they can't admit it because they're afraid that knowledge would demotivate the replaceable cogs.
Nothing, but engineers are expensive, so if you can spend a couple thousand dollars to get better value for the money, you might as well.
Of course, some companies spend far more than that, which is probably not economical.
Because of this, the interview process is not designed to efficiently handle a minority of qualified candidates, but rather efficiently weed out a majority of horrible candidates. It is therefore a terrible process for the people actually qualified to pass it.
Every state in the US is an "at will" state, meaning a company can fire you with no reason as long as it isn't discriminatory towards a protected demographic.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/at-will-emp...
Even with at will, the company can get into difficulty with unfair dismissal and other issues.
The few times I've seen someone fired (and fired fired not PIP or layoff) have been for clear and undeniable issues. The "your work isn't up to performance standards" without a PIP falls into the rare bucket (and more likely at the small companies than the larger ones).
How is hiring a mediocre developer worse than hiring a charlatan?