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Programmer jobs are harder to fill because programmers have a long list of personal preferences, trick questions, random algorithms to quiz your depth of understanding on, arbitrary answers and stack-specific questions in their arsenal for rejecting candidates. Everyone else focuses on what the job actually entails and how much they will be making.

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I also feel like many programmers enjoy making interview questions as tricky as they can and finding every possible reason to reject other programmers they’re interviewing in order to appear superior in abilities. How can it be that every company complains they cannot hire engineers fast enough, pay 10s of thousands to outsourced recruiters and recruitment services, and yet there are many engineers, not short of decent ones, having to go through at least 5-7 interviews in order to land one offer.

Yes, existing devs often have a vested interest in rejecting candidates, especially those hires who are more senior than them, and whose job they might have aspired to fill as an internal promotion.

The architect might pass interviews for tech strategy, systems engineering, innovation and mentoring, but be failed by the senior devs on some detailed low-level tech question, which just happens to keep that architect slot open for them in the future - even if it means more workload in the short term.

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