P.01AI engineer is not ML engineer. One trains models, the other builds products on them. The screen that tells them apart and finds people who actually ship.
P.02The .NET platform changed more in three years than the decade before. What a strong .NET developer looks like now, and what marks a 2015 mindset.
P.03Java 21 brought virtual threads; Spring Boot 3 needs Java 17. Most job posts still test for Java 8. What a strong Java developer actually looks like now.
P.04Flutter dominates cross-platform mobile now, and the gap between tutorial-complete and production-shipped is wide. The screen that finds the difference.
P.05Everyone claims ML experience since the AI boom. The screen that separates people who ship ML systems from people who fine-tuned once in a Colab notebook.
P.06PHP runs most of the web and the pool is huge, which makes it easy to hire someone who knows PHP and hard to hire someone who can actually build with it.
P.07Laravel 12 is a different framework from the one people picture when they dismiss PHP. The stack, the tooling, and when a team should actually reach for it.
P.08Rails 8 changed the deployment and infrastructure story. A developer who kept up looks different from one working off 2019 knowledge. What to screen for.
P.09Rust is growing in backend, systems, and WASM. The challenge is telling developers who understand ownership from those who just fight the borrow checker.
P.10Vue 3 is the default now and the Options API is legacy. What a strong Vue developer looks like, what questions reveal real skill, and the red flags.
P.11Both formats have real problems, and AI made take-homes worse. What each predicts, where each fails, and the hybrid that beats either one on its own.
P.12Most reference checks are theater: three friends say nice things and you move on. How to run calls that surface real information before you make an offer.