It’s tough! To deal with it, I have been avoiding idealizing those companies. In the end, It’s just a job, like whatever job.
Sometimes is hard to employ a lot of energy to get at the end of a hiring process just to discover that you aren’t a good fit, but I think that it is easier to alleviate the frustrations when you set the correct expectations about it, it’s just a job and just move forward.
IMHO this happens because some companies prefer to define seniority based on some specific technical knowledge they deem important (even if it’s completely unrelated to the work) instead of considering the candidate’s soft skills, career experience, and what that person can actually bring to the table. Of course, technical knowledge is important, however, jobs where you have to be super-specialized, are really rare and require a very specific skill-set.
This kinda behavior leads to some very weird biases like, for example:
Once I got rejected on a job interview in an agency because I didn’t remember how to calculate a password complexity given some constraints… The question was framed along the lines of “how long a machine with a processing capacity of X would take to brute-force a password constructed with a given subset of chars”.
The interesting part is that they were trying to hire someone to maintain some sort of integration they had with WordPress, and the fact that I had (at the time) 6+ years of experience with web development didn’t contribute at all to my case, go figure. The cherry on top was talking to the other candidate afterward and learning that he was actually studying that discipline at college (he was in the second semester or something like that) but he didn’t actually have any experience working in the field.
Another time I got on the phone with a recruiter that was in deep **** needing a senior developer. I explained that I didn’t have the time to meet with them that day, but they insisted on their urgency. I moved an important appointment that I had and traveled to another city to meet with them for the interview. After an hour-long talk with the CEO, I went to talk to the CTO for another hour where he asked me a lot of technical questions. After that, even though the knew I was on a tight schedule, the CTO wanted me to do some sort of generic knowledge pop quiz he had prepared and after I explained I didn’t have enough time that day to do that, he explained that he couldn’t continue with my interview process because he needed a “holistic view” of my skills.
On another situation I was called to do an interview where I was the only one that passed all the interview steps but got rejected in the end because I didn’t have any certificates (even with a lot of experience). They had this policy where senior developers had to have an X amount of certificates to be considered “seniors”.
The lesson I take from those experiences is that most of the people hiring are not qualified to hire people. They are not even (most of the time) qualified to deal with people in the first place. On the technical side though, beyond having unreasonable expectations, I’d say these companies don’t want to invest resources in hiring people that are good problem solvers, have decent people skills, or have at least some level of critical thinking… Unless of course, if you manage to prove in some sort of tribalistic rite of passage that you are in fact worthy.
PS.: People in our field need to learn how to be more like humans and less like computers.
Sorry, I’ll rant some more. But your very open and clear take made me want to talk more about the topic. 
Very nicely summed. That’s one of my main takeaways as well. It’s not like they don’t want problem solvers (something you mentioned at the end of your comment) – they absolutely want them, but they fixate on random and oddly specific metrics and are insistent on them.
This is super sad and super normal. I’ve met a lot of people whose implicit behaviour just screamed “you need the job, you’ll bend to our process and schedule!” and at one point I just started recognizing those people and learned to bail early. It’s very much like dating: you don’t want to waste a lot of hours on somebody who’s giving away red flags early on.
Can we be mistaken in such situations? Of course we can! We aren’t without bias and flaws in our judgement – like everybody else. But in my anecdotal experience, at least my job hunt process has improved noticeably after I started stopping processes early after noticing the said red flags.
I also started communicating a lot more casually and dropped the business lingo and “professional” attitude because I really don’t care to respect people who openly disrespect me. I started using expressions like “OK, I understand the tech interview in 2 steps – homework plus then a live session – but why the hell do I need to fill huge questionnaires, especially after you have 90% of the answers already in my first emails? Let’s be professional and respect each others’ time, please?” One guy straight out told me it’s not my place to question the process and I also outright told him thank I thank him for making it crystal clear that I don’t want to work for them. 
LOL 
Also very true. Most people are kind of coerced into it, too, so very often it’s not their fault at all: “Hey X, thanks for being such a strong developer and pushing our mission forward for 2 full years now. We need to expand our team. Can you please interview those 20 candidates?” and then the guy/girl literally has 2-3 days to learn all about recruiting programmers and of course they fail, panic and resort to their most primitive and ugly biases and gut instincts.
(I once “failed” an interview because I mentioned I don’t care about Game of Thrones and it was all the rage back then; I could immediately judge by the faces of the two interviewers that the interview result was sealed right there and then.)
Programmers are very tribal animals. And a good chunk of them are very immature. The moment one of them figures that you “don’t fit in” – for whatever random metric they chose – then it’s a done deal.
I don’t like it but there’s absolutely nothing we can do. People with warm seats (e.g. not getting fired unless the company goes under) tend to become complacent, biased, judgemental and set in their ways. I have seen such people literally at every company I ever worked with. People in general shouldn’t be given power at all because 99% of them absolutely can’t handle it. (Which gives me a huge respect for those that can.)
Yeah, that was the reason I “failed” my best paid job ever last year. They expected you to learn everything by yourself and basically do self-onboard in a huge stack where I had to know my way around at least 5 core projects and be well-familiarized with 25+ more, be able to do Ops and system administration, tune my Linux installation for anything and everything that might be needed for the job, know the Kubernetes stack intimately and replicate part of it locally… in the first 2 or so months. All gods are my witnesses I did my best and IMO I did well (but not perfectly) but since I lost motivation half-way (it was bit of a hostile environment; if you don’t act a certain way the others don’t even respond to your legitimate questions… which was hugely depressing) and it took me a few weeks to regain it… again, it was a done deal even before that.
…What I can say? Tribal animals. 
The “rite of passage” expression struck me as 100% accurate there.
I am not a businessman yet – and it’s unclear if I’ll ever be – but as time goes on I keep spotting very typical programmer biases which kind of make me ashamed to call myself a programmer. I think I’ll eventually move to a consultant and/or an architect. As time goes on I find it easier and easier to work with certain programmers (and love doing it) but also harder and harder to work with many others.
Kind of, but there’s a broader way of looking at this. Dan Sperber (evolutionary psychologist) & colleagues argue that reason evolved not to discover truth, but to win arguments. Which explains much if it is the case. People make decisions, then argue the case for them. My observation is that this seems to be particularly true in highly interactive social settings - like interview! The natural affordance of an interview is to create a situation where the interviewer makes a quick intuitive judgement, then fills in the reasoning ex post facto. Which is why they don’t work.
I wish I could remember the source of someone once writing, in response to fears about AI I think, that their worry wasn’t that computers would learn to be like humans, but that humans would learn to become more like computers.
Haha. So true.
You guys are much better than me at summarizing. I love reading your replies. 
I’d say that’s quite true of every profession. After a bunch of years of study, internships and dealing with the competence"colleagues" of our optics store, the sheer amount of incompetence and toxic attitudes would make you think healthcare is full of crap. Healthcare. Some people care more about keeping/escalating a position by whatever means necessary(and anything foreign is a threat) more than doing a good or meaningful job, which sucks especially if you have no voice. But it’s also an opportunity to differentiate yourself as a person who knows about #{profession}. “Barely overcoming the general mediocrity” as someone I met liked to say.
I speak purely from what I lived in that particular profession, but humans are humans, you can ask people working in any profession and they will have similar stories.
Roughly two years ago I quit my last job as a front-end expert, seeking a full-time Elixir job. I was passionate but didn’t have enough expertise to get hired by most of the companies. I was almost to go back for a JavaScript job. But my present boss hired me.
It was dramatic because when the job found me, I was reading the book The MaxCoders Guide To Finding Your Dream Developer Job. It says best developers are not on the marketplace, neither are best jobs. They are recommended by friends. How true to me! My boss and I met at ElixirConf 2019 and had some good conversations there. Since then we are friends on LinkedIn.
The point is,
This thread reminds me the only time I tried to get into a FAANG and failed hugely to write code in a whiteboard. It hit me so hard at the time that I even thought I was done through my career. A few years later, doing Elixir in production for not such a hyped company, I consider myself much more satisfied in my job than some friends of mine that are into those.
How can you say you failed your dream job when you never worked it for even a day? That job could have turned out to be crap in just a few months/weeks (days even).
The “dream job” is the one you work at for years, happy when you wake up in the mornings knowing that you’ll get to do something interesting and useful at work that day. Where your co-workers are smart and helpful people you get along great with. Your boss and boss’s boss are terrific people you admire. The company is solid and makes an honest profit providing quality products/services to people without stealing their data or milking them like cows.
Maybe there are 10000 people who ever lived who got to work in their dream job somewhere at some time in history.
Keep your chin up and keep looking. Maybe you’ll get to be the 10001st.
Thanks for your input, really interesting to read. Could you elaborate on what those biases are?