Getting rejected from multiple interviews isn't a particularly big roadblock, you just need to do more. Or you have to improve. If you have a degree and aren't completely incompetent you will get a job sooner or later as long as you don't stop applying.

"But I got rejected once, it is proof that hard work and performance doesn't pay off!"

No, hard work includes trying multiple times. Over multiple tries the probability of you being unlucky in the interview goes to 0. It might take hundreds of tries, but if you can do the work you will get accepted at some point. Life being unfair doesn't mean that performance or hard work doesn't pay off, just that they maybe don't pay off as much as they ought to.

The argument was not about interviews but tests and skills. Which I did.

The "luck/unfair" argument is exactly what I was talking about. You shouldn't need luck to get hired in a system after 7+ years of hard work.

Add to that that I've seen a lot of incompetent people (both in skills, dedication or even diligence) in the field. This renders the excellence argument moot.

The system is filled with low efficiency bits at every scale, HR only call you if they match a tag or a fancy school, the tech interviewer might very well be a young dude knowing moot but not willing to annoy his superior with bad hires. It's mostly tribalism and politics driving the machine. Not objective qualities.

At first I thought you were one of those who spent years not getting their first job, but no you worked in the industry for 7 whole years! Did you get paid much more than McDonalds wage during those years? Then you got rewarded for your performance! You are therefore a perfect example of someone getting rewarded for performance. Rewards aren't perfectly correlated with performance, no, but that doesn't mean that performance doesn't get rewarded.

Sure, it is hard to earn more than you earn now. But you are still earning way more than most, and all that required was to pass a few tests. How can you call that not rewarding performance?

7 years of study.

Also we're not on the same page about reward/excellency. Having a high salary after graduation doesn't mean you're doing good / excellent work. You can, and I've heard a lot of people saying it, coast along being paid for not a lot.

Every company I worked at had terrible software, there was no excellency in them (which backfires toward all society). Another proof to me that the system is not optimizing excellency. It's short term gain spread over a wide network of ignorance (your customer can never assess of your work quality, he has no clue about the domain).