Comment by hiou
11 years ago
I've been there as well. I interviewed at a design agency a while back. I nailed all of their puzzles pretty easily only to get there and realize I was going to be doing Wordpress hacking and other CMS work from 2010. I left after a few months because of how trivial I realized the work would be in the long term.
On the exit meeting it was relayed to me that they were having trouble finding people because no one could pass their tests and I was beside myself because I couldn't understand how they would expect someone with that technical ability to want to bang out Wordpress sites all day while there are 100s of people who would love to do that job and be very successful without ever even knowing what basic recursion let along the stuff they had in their test. Bizarre.
Also - a big motivation for work is learning. Didn't someone say "never apply for a position your qualified for"?
I don't know who said that, and while I strongly agree with it in principle ... in practice it just tends to not work out like that. Employers want a cog in a machine. They don't want you to 'stretch, grow or learn' on their dime - no employer is willing to take that risk. Further, career progression in the tech industry is commensurate with the degree to which you've been pigeonholed in a particular skill or task. So a high salary is usually indicative, not of the diversity of your skillset but how well you perform within certain narrow parameters.