>I can only assume the author has not interviewed many candidates.
I did more than 100 interviews so far.
>I've lost count of how many tenured engineers I've interviewed who could not write basic code or explain basic programming concepts. Things that a practicing programmer would encounter every week.
Where did I say that I agree with this statement. This is what other engineers claim, and as you pointed out being said many times.
I am totally against this claim as well. I do think that those tenured engineers should be interviewed for basic coding skills too. Just last month I had a staff+ engineer not being able to write a DFS...
That part in the article is ironic, hence why I said that I didn't want to make it a discussion about the fact that we have these coding interviews, and to "Get over it!" :)