Unsure. I have really only seen it in programming. I dont think accountants get told “here balance these books before we proceed with the rest of the interview” designers and architects maybe asked to show a portfolio of work though.

Tabs vs spaces is a little bit of an exaggeration. But it was a number of jobs where they dont tell you what it is they are looking for and you just are ment to glean it by reading tea leaves or some such.

One that stands out was an interview with Octopus and they tell me “solve this problem” and i write legitimate code that solves all cases of the problem and fully unit tested and they send an email saying “sorry we were looking for code in a more functional programming style. We are not continuing with this application”. I was mad… If they just told me that i would have written it like that.

Just started a new job this week.

Damn tech work has been a wild ride! From the hights of 2021 where if you could use a keyboard without looking then you could land a Senior Engineer role easy peasy. To 2025 where recruiters ask you to build a whole damn website then throw out your weeks worth of work because you used spaces instead of tabs in your code telling you “you wont integrate well with the team”.

Increasing the level of punishment seldom works. It only corrects for one state of mind, the “if i get caught its not that bad” mind set. But a lot of people operate in other mind sets such as

Crafty: “i have thought this out and i am not going to get caught” so the consequences dont matter

Passion: “I really want to do/have this thing!” So the consequences dont matter

Or Disregard: “fuck da police!” So the consequences dont matter

On top of that fines are usually mailed out and take a week to get to you which makes it hard to associate the punishment to the crime because it is long in the past, so people just feel like the punishment is only vindictive.

In saying that however, I am all for means tested fines so that if you are done speeding in your 2025 Mercedes you get a fine that feels like punishment and not just “oh no my parking change!”