I still remember when I helped a friend at another "famous company" not to get kicked out due to incompetence and wrote some program for him overnight. His colleagues weren't able to understand what it was doing for over a month, it made it to the software core of devices they shipped and he received a yearly innovation award for it. A year later I met him and he was sarcastically pointing out a small bug in the code he found (well, since then I try not to help).
Yet, he would have far higher chance to land in your company than me, because he would be super happy to pass FizzBuzz, whereas I would just walk away the moment you give it to me and make myself off for a month on Bora Bora to wash away the disgust I felt over your arrogance and pride you demonstrated on the interview.
"No good goes unpunished"-style? I definitely wouldn't want to work for a person with perverted views of justice as you imply, so you'd make all us a favor by exposing yourself right away.
For what it's worth, I have a strong reverence for those that see their own value, and I wish more people were like you.
At $JOB I feel bad that a lot of the talent on our team is squandered because they lack the self-confidence to speak up and question the status-quo.
I want to work with other people who have a deep-seated desire to do the right things, rather than only ever doing what they were explicitly asked to do.
So, kudos to you. Keep on fighting the good fight.
And this gets back to my main point. If you wrote code that no one can understand, you wrote unmaintainable code that was a net negative to the company.
Yet that piece of code that made me altruistically sleep deprived and for which I didn't get anything proved to be extremely valuable to company, its customers, to my friend and his colleagues that could learn something useful. Yet it didn't follow any process, so it better not happened :D
Also, to address one more point in your reply - the inability to understand was a result of their incompetence, not the difficulty of the program (some standard C code).
So I’m sure you’ve heard that once you think everyone is wrong - you might need to look at yourself. That’s just like if I hear someone who has been married four times and complain about how each one of their wives were horrible people and since have gotten remarried and have happy lives, they probably weren’t the problem.
I’m not saying your opinion is wrong because you are in the minority. I’m saying if $x number of engineers who work at the target company and are producing code everyday can’t understand your code, it is more likely that your code was obfuscated than that they were incompetent.
But if it was code that didn’t follow a process - especially C code - it could have had all sorts of security vulnerabilities. What if their process was never to use the “unsafe” variants of the C string and memory standard library functions?
It featured a simple callback and they couldn't wrap their head around it. Now it sounds laughable, it made me feel sick at that time and I avoided that "leading" company since, and it unfortunately skewed my view of anyone who ever worked there. I know it shouldn't have, but I am a limited human being as well and have to use some decision heuristics.
Yet, he would have far higher chance to land in your company than me, because he would be super happy to pass FizzBuzz, whereas I would just walk away the moment you give it to me and make myself off for a month on Bora Bora to wash away the disgust I felt over your arrogance and pride you demonstrated on the interview.