It is a familiar comment that Ph.D. holders cannot program. I have a Ph.D. and I dare say I can program. I was offered a position by Google recently so I am above some threshold. It is really unfair to paint a broad class of people with such a sweeping brush. I find that people often overestimate efforts required to attain a skill level, probably due to human nature to elevate one's own skills or importance, or they unconsciously conflate familiarity with general intelligence. It is impossible to reinvent collaborative filtering within 45 minutes without any prior exposure if not told any reason behind or constraints under which collaborative filtering was invented. Software engineers ask basic questions from the narrow fields they operate in day in and day out and believe that the interviewees have all requisite knowledge and answers should pop into their heads. On the contrary, basic questions are often fundamental innovations and it is no small feat to come up answers in the first place. It is a hallmark of a real intellectual to probe deeper and learn from that experience and realize insights and reasons for reaching innovative solutions, so that next time he or she will be innovative quicker or better.

It is hard to accurately judge someone in 45 minutes. I made a mistake with fizzbuzz three years ago when interviewing with the hacker school (now called recurse center), so what? It isn't I cannot do it but that I was looking for better ways and not finding it. After reading that there is no shorter way than to enumerate all four possibilities I was able to mentally unlock. It took just a few months of studying example code and discerning coding patterns for different logic control flows and now multiple programmers have commented that I write readable code. Anyone who has worked through real analysis problems can reason through most code well. It is a matter of concentration and time. I firmly believe programmers can make good ML engineers even though I spent years on numerical linear algebra, mathematical programming (optimization), statistics with measure theory and I still feel I have huge gaps in knowledge. So what if someone doesn't know a basic theorem, as long as they can learn enough and apply it to do their job. We take people as they are and help them grow into roles we want. I hope you will give everyone a fair chance.