This is half the point of interviewing. I've been at places that just skip interviewing is the person comes highly recommended, has a great CV, or whatever.

Predictably they end up with some people on the range from "can't code at all" to "newbie coder without talent"

I've never met someone like that and don't believe the claim.

Maybe you mean people who are bad at interviews? Or people whose job isn't actually programming? Or maybe "lots" means "at least one"? Or maybe they can strictly speaking do fizzbuzz, but are "in any case bad programmers"? If your claim is true, what do these people do all day (or, let's say, did before LLMs were a thing...)?

I've definitely worked with a person who struggled to write if statements (let alone anything more complex). This was just one guy, so I wouldn't say "lots and lots" like the other poster did, but they do exist.

Yeah I’ve been doing this for a while now and I’ve never met an employed developer who didn’t know what a function is or couldn’t write a basic program.

I’ve met some really terrible programmers, and some programmers who freeze during interviews.

By "lots" I estimate about 40 percent of the software developer workforce. (Not a scientific estimate.)

> Maybe you mean people who are bad at interviews?

No, the opposite. These developers learn the relevant buzzwords and can string them together convincingly, but fail to actually understand what they're regurgitating. (Very similar to an LLM, actually.)

E.g., these people will throw words like "Dunder method" around with great confidence, but then will completely melt down for fifteen minutes if a function argument has the same name as a module.

When on the job these people just copy-paste existing code from the "serious company" monorepo all day, every day. They call it "teamwork".