As someone who is a Sr. Software Engineer at this point in my life, I started in mechanical engineering. I've been on both sides of the table for both positions and the differences between how candidates are evaluated is vastly different.
Mechanical engineers from my experience essentially go through talks with their future boss and coworkers to evaluate if the person would be a good fit on the team, with technical ability coming up very rarely as it's ON THE RESUME.
Software engineers on the otherhand are treated as if they do not have past experience in industry and are subjected to college tutoring whiteboard sessions (I was also a tutor in college). From my experience, the interviews rarely even introduce you to the team, or even talk about the toolings required for the job.
The hands down best software interview I've been through, unsurprisingly was not at a "tech" company, but rather Alaska Airlines. Talked about the project with the manager and how I would be able to contribute, met the team, did an actual coding exercise RELATED to the actual project that lasted 5 minutes and landed the job.
I second this heavily. I've implemented a 3d scene renderer for 3D CAM software in the past and have been wanting to get back into some 3D things to practice math as I've been feeling a bit behind where I used to be.
I spent a while getting an OpenGL environment setup in VisualStudio and got frustrated with the tooling as I've also been spending much of the last 3 years doing trivial web development. I ran across shadertoy and was able to whip up much of the core of the pathtracer there and very easily move it over to it's own project supper easily utilising REGL (https://github.com/regl-project/regl) in ~100 lines that included a camera, dynamic shader compilation based on a scene, etc...
Legacy code is always frustrating. I had to pick up Delphi at one point to fix a bug in an application who's only job was to relay specific windows messages (essentially a broker).
5 sold days getting the environment setup (every dependency had to be in the PATH), 20 min to make the change then another 3 days getting the installer build environment setup.
But don't conflate tough with what frustrates people. I spent 2-3 years designing and building 3D CAM software that presented MANY challenging problems from abstracting platform API's to optimzing toolpaths for cost effective manufaturing.
Not once did I get frustrated with the learning or implemention process. The frustration in a sr devs life (in my experience) usually comes from uper management putting "really cool" features on the back-burner to never be seen again.
I walk away if they won't compensate me. Not worth my time or the time of any engineer.
Usually the tasks are remedial like "visualize this api using x tech with y library". Things that you have 10+ github projects posted that could easily be used as a reference.
The interview process has not once proceeded when I refused a task on the basis of already having an example of the requested posted. If that isn't a sign of things to come to you, I don't know what would be.
Us car enthusiasts are pretty upset we are not getting the next Focus/Fiesta ST's. First time with a true mechanical differential and twin-scroll turbos. What a shame.
