* to the company the cost of a false positive (bad hire) is very very much higher than the cost of a false negative (passing on a good candidate).
* AI companies have a large pool of strong candidates to interview
* Therefore they are incentivized to make their interview process hard enough that a poor candidate almost never passes it
* but then it becomes something a strong candidate can only pass with a bit of good luck
This is not “fair”, but it’s a marketplace. The best approach is the one you propose: accept it and don’t take it personally if you miss, roll the dice again.
It’s a different ballgame when you can gamble $20k to make $1M.
Otoh, if you hire me to frame a house, it'll be objectively clear you need to get rid of me in the first hour, if not the first ten minutes. I don't know how I'd get past a screening for that either, but still.
Personally I don’t agree with the crazy tech interviews at all, no other job on the planet does it like this, even high skill jobs like doctors or professors. They hire based on your experience, your references, and a good chat to make sure you’d be a culture fit. If there’s a serious problem with a doctor once they start the job, they’d be let go, but they’re professionals so this isn’t a super common occurrence.
The exact same process could be taken with developers IMO. If I have a seasoned career, you should hire me based on that, not because I jumped through hoops you set up.
My experience exactly! I've been lucky in most of my interviews that I was asked about things I just happened to brush up on or had thought about deeply in some past project, so I was offered the job.
And like you say, the job rarely demanded any of the things I was asked about... which worked against me once, where I sailed through the interview process but struggled for the first year to get up to speed in my actual day-to-day job, although I did manage to get my act together before it became a big problem.
I know, because I’ve been rejected and accepted to the same company before based on different interview questions, and did just fine in the role once I was in there.
In short, if you have decent skills the tech interviewers are mostly total random luck IMO, so just do a bunch of em and you’ll get lucky somewhere. It won’t make any rational sense at all later where you end up, but who cares.