Ask HN: Anyone else struggling to get a software dev job?
Recently interviewed with a medium sized company for a backend dev position.
They said I passed the interviews and promised an offer. After a month of "trying to find a customer to place me", telling me I'm a fantastic candidate etc. they finally decided to cancel the verbal offer until maybe next year.
I've recently had other bad experiences were they basically try to find excuses to cut me on interviews. It's like I'm answering the questions correctly minus one, so I'm disqualified.
I don't remember job searching being that hard even a few years ago, anybody relates?
188 comments
[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 209 ms ] threadIf you talk with them as if meeting the client is the expected next step, they’ll take you more seriously, too.
Companies are not hiring as much they were when the world economy was booming. And for those of us outside the US, in Africa, to be precise, there's now less remote on HN whoishiring. The remote jobs posted there now are mainly for those domiciled in the US. I would have to look towards other platforms come next month. I've always used HN to connect to top companies but for a while things haven't been that good.
Table stakes (and it sucks to say this, but it's true) is you've mastered the leetcode/cracking the coding interview style questions. I'm a self taught SW engineer so I had to spend about a year cranking on these type of questions before I was proficient. I spend a month or two reviewing before I start any interview cycle.
Do you have any idea where your weaknesses might be?
I've found that the problem-solving whiteboarding that is common in the industry reflects my university comp sci education (binary tree, big O notation, etc).
On the other hand, I also have zero interest in working for a FAANG so that might have something to do with it.
Is it right that a lot of companies want you to invert a binary tree on a whiteboard to get a 400-600k TC job? I dunno. But that is the state of things, to me it seems pretty easy to just study for a couple months and then remove that hurdle from the process.
Yeah, unfortunately some candidates get very abusive if you tell them why you've chosen not to move forward (ex. one sent me numerous nasty emails for months after they were rejected). I still like to give feedback to everyone, because I'd rather live in a more honest and direct culture, but it's very understandable why most employers don't.
I don't discount your situation above or pretend to know all the aspects, however objectively looking at it, blocking the persons email address would solve some of those issues. I assume most places do this. Noting that even if you didn't give them feedback, ghosted, or rejected them, they could have also sent numerous nasty emails anyway.
I would like to see at some point some of the same professionalism, such as you show with your feedback to candidate's, from all companies that "evidently" have huge wishlists and want to hire professionals.
* I haven't found any sites or papers that have tracked giving / not giving feedback to candidate's and the prospective results outside of anecdotal situations.
* I did notice that some places such as Dragos do list feed back as part of the process. <https://www.dragos.com/blog/what-to-expect-when-interviewing...>
But seriously, I honestly dont know. When I ask for feedback, even during the interview, I get, at best, a "I think you're doing fine" answer.
* there is a pool of interviewers for each set of subjects
* hiring manager picks the subjects, and thus people are signed up for that pool get an interview slot.
* interviewers talk to the candidate one on one (sometimes two on one if there is someone in training or it's a pair panel). They avoid talking to each other until everyone finished with their interviews, so as not to bias each interview. No "This candidate is great" -- never discuss the candidate until everyone is done.
* interviewers fill out a form with feedback. The form contains info about what was asked and how the candidate did.
* hiring manager gets all the forms and makes a decision based on what is on the form. No side channel "Hey, I said 'hire', but really it should be a 'no hire'". If the hiring manager has a question, there is a recorded feedback mechanism in the form where details can be solicited.
* HR keeps all the feedback forms
Asking if you were better or worse than the previous candidate is a no-no. They are not going to tell you, and you shouldn't ask. Because of that, you can't gauge whether you are the best candidate or not, which means you don't know if you got the job.
You can ask if you did well, and they will give you a bland "You did fine", because they don't know if you will be hired or not. Also, most interviewers understand that it is a pain, so when they say "I appreciate you coming in", they usually mean it. Everyone's been on the other side, and we really do appreciate you coming in, and most of the time you really did do fine, and that's all we can say. It's rare to get a really bad interview. In those cases where the interview is awful, I try to say find something positive and then say "well, try not to worry too much". The goal is to be honest, non-committal, and supportive at the same time - because maybe the person might come back and interview later, or maybe they will tell their colleagues, and the last thing you want to do is to give them a bad experience or make them think you are giving them a hard time just because they couldn't answer some questions.
Only the hiring manager knows, at the end of the process, what all the feedback is. Even if you think they did great, if several other people on the panel don't, it's probably a no-hire. The person who met you at the door, offered you coffee, and is shepherding people in and out of the room doesn't know, either. They will try to make you comfortable, make sure everything goes smoothly, and tell you that you did fine.
Only in extreme cases will you get meaningful feedback during the interview. One time I asked one of our standard questions, and the candidate refused to answer. He started arguing with me, saying it wasn't a good question. It was pretty shocking. We don't just ask any question, the questions are reviewed by other people. If I give you a program and ask you to calculate the running time, don't refuse to do that because you don't like the program. It doesn't matter if you don't like it, just answer the question. After you answer the question, you can mention why this type of program is often unnecessary. So that was one situation where I gave feedback, along the lines of "It's not a good interview if you don't answer the question". Please don't have a chip on your shoulder. I know interviews can be irritating and nerve wracking, but let's just get through it with professionalism and a minimum of drama. Odds are good that you did fine, and if even you didn't, there's no point in worrying too much about it.
I don't want to wax on about why we need DS&A tests in SW interviews, I think it gets taken to a silly degree and is in no way the only marker for what makes a good engineer. I just think that, as an interviewer, if I ask a question that I'm required to ask as part of the interview loop, and I get some comments about how these questions are silly or the candidate just falls on their face and can't do it... it shows more than a lack of time spent with cracking the coding interview. It shows lack of preparation and you can extrapolate that to the rest of the candidates work. If that person thinks the prep is silly, the prep we all know we need to do for a high paying job, and they just don't do it... it doesn't say anything positive.
Luckily at the company I work at now, you have plenty of chances to prove you just didn't refresh DS&A knowledge and you can still be hired, but why have your docket show up to the panel with an extra thumbs down when passing the bar is so easy... I don't know.
But that isn’t true. A surgeon isn’t asked to do a quick review of random medical facts before they take an interview.
I refuse to submit to this ridiculous process, and therefore I’m always failing out in the leetcode part. I’d rather spend my time doing something useful or relaxing.
The leetcode questions are just Data Structures and Algorithms questions. If you can talk through a couple different data structures, accurately describe the time complexity of your solution, and implement a half working solution you’ll pass. If you haven’t studied DS&A then I don’t think you have worked to perfect your craft, and I don’t want you on my team. This isn’t a trivia test, it’s a small bar that is trivial to get over.
This all required from companies that face no penalty if you start on day one and don't have proper tooling, make up applications and tooling as needed, no standard software workflows, side step security policies, etc. Seems a bit rich asking candidate's to be of such high caliber when the company isn't also held to same standard outside of high compensation.
At least in the US exercise the 90 day period maybe plan 3 months of severance and move on. It probably amounts to the same effort anyway, not that I know of any company that is tracking this or making the data publicly available to study.
I agree with you that knowing or thinking about DS&A as part of honing your developmental skills or working with a new language is useful, however I think the scope of it as a sharpened skill provides overall diminishing returns as most people only brush up on it for interviews. This is what I would surmise the previous poster was alluding to in that its not a generally called upon skill in day-to-day software development use, so what purpose is there in asking about it unless a performance issue/enhancement was part of the general discussion.
It is also possible that companies that ask these types of questions are providing indicators of how they operate. To some making a ton of money isn't what they are after so eliminating these types of companies is beneficial to them. Otherwise if 10x the money is your goal, then as you said its just a small hurdle.
That being said, I'm committed to giving every applicant direct feedback. Feel free to apply to Grit. [0] https://getgrit.notion.site/Grit-Job-Board-31942eda7b0e49478...
I recently got feedback that I "didn't have enough experience working with other teams".
What I was actually asked in the interview was to tell a story about a time I'd worked with another team. Apparently that story wasn't good enough... somehow.
It’s almost invariably “I didn’t like the way you named this variable” kind. I can’t ever let it go when I get a result that is so clearly biased/bullshit.
One interesting thing that happened to me was I kept at the interviews and found a few that flowed more like the conversations I would prefer to have at an interview. This helped with dissipating the self-doubt as I was constantly re-iterating on the positions I was applying to, the companies, job description wording, etc. and seriously questioned "Is this the state if hiring?"
I'm in the cybersecurity realm coming from a sysadmin, networking, background with a recent masters. Companies want people with years of experience as if most businesses outside aerospace and the government in the last 10 years made security a high priority. My observation is that insurance companies realized the risk related to policy payouts and "now" security is a requirement of future riders/contracts.
Low years of experience or a poor resume/CV? Yeah, I bet it's a bit harder than usual.
10+ years or a great resume/CV? You're still getting flooded, although Amazon and Meta spam have stopped for a bit.
I've seen decent people gave difficult searches every year for the last 12, there is a randomness to this and a specificity to any individual's job search.
But with some patience you can keep your standards reasonably high and that will serve you well for years to come.
I'm a computer programmer in my early 40s and I've started seeing a decrease in unsolicited LinkedIn emails once I got to 35, give or take a year or two.
I did just announce that I was running a startup, though, so I just assumed that the sharks will start circling in a couple of months hoping I fail and need a new job.
They always oh you are good but we found someone with more number of years and whatever... I still thank God the industry is such that you never feel desperate. Partly, because you always have part-time gigs coming through and also you're well compensated.
Wishing you good luck man! You're not alone.
Next time a company tells you about their mission statement, stop them midway, eyes open in awe, and say "That's my mission statement."
Do the same thing when they tell you about their tech stack. Or anything else. I'm not kidding. The last applicant agreed with everything, and you need to agree with everything harder.
Agreeability and disagreeability are two separate skills but the tech industry sees it as a spectrum. They do not hire disagreeable people.
And this is why skilled people can't find a job. Unless you can kiss a*s you won't get hired. This is wrong! If some one agrees with every word you say, this should be a red light. This might means the person don't have a mind of there own. Unless you want to hire a robot ^_^
Anyway you don't have to kiss ass. All you have to do is have a solution to problems and ability to shape ideas not just cut them off. Unless it's nodejs. That can just fuck off.
When I hire people myself I'm looking for people who are opinionated but can back that up with experience and evidence and thought processes which show how the conclusion was reached. I really don't want to hire passive production monkeys.
- Great idea
- Makes total sense
- That's how I would do it
- I agree
And this is not a joke.
I agree. The problem starts when this sort of friction continues after all the decision-making is done and starts manifesting as contrarian positions towards how the project is being conducted, always insisting that their idea was better, and even assuming aspects of sabotage.
It's one thing to determine a path forward, but an entirely different thing to assume a "my way or no way" stance.
me: "ok."
(even though this will cost hundreds of productivity hours - explaining it to new devs and wondering why all your history disappeared again, sigh you shouldn't rebase on a public branch! , gah fuck it)
Yeah, sure, sounds like a great idea.
Not a problem.
Rebase is a tradeoff of handling merge conflicts with achieving a commit history that is far cleaner and audit-friendly.
The point being that some technical choices are not black and white, and people mistake baseless personal opinions with technical truths. There's an awful lot of workable grey areas with tradeoffs.
If a team member insists on pushing his personal opinions as the truth, challenges and opposes each and every proposal that does not match his personal opinion, and drags on personal vendettas in decisions that didn't went their way... I'd say that no matter where their tech skills are, that person is still incompetent and a liability in any team.
You're trying too hard to rationalize away personal problems and your inability and/or unwillingness to address them.
The opposite of disagreeable is not "kissing ass". The opposite of disagreeable, to start off, is not being a total asshole. No one's technical prowess is impressive enough to ignore the fact that they are completely insufferable. A project survives extra weeks or even months, but a team does not survive an eggeegious team member who makes everyone around them miserable.
Take a long hard look at yourself before throwing blanket accusations at anyone and everyone around you.
As the saying goes, "if someone is an asshole, they're an asshole, if everyone is an asshole, you're the asshole"
"I will say yes to absolutely everything you say" is not at all the same thing as "I will do a good job."
There are absolutely far too many workplaces where you are expected to kiss ass to be hired or to progress.
Personally, I know that I would never feel OK working there, so I don't see the point of trying to pretend I'm an ass-kisser in interviews. I actually am an agreeable person, overall; I just want to find a place to work that will be OK working with me, not with some extremely different false face I have to spend a huge amount of energy putting on every day just to get paid there.
Missed calls, days to hear anything, weeks of back and forth, constant apologies, spaced out mgmt, PMs, euphemisms, platitudes, a whole bunch of typical humans nitpicking every sentence and syntax structure, unpaid wages… it’s rampant across society and we all keep accepting it.
You’re turning this into a blame game on one person when there’s plenty of anecdotes, legal cases, and data to show that company’s are full of assholes.
Stop your anonymouse trolling on HN and seek some professional mental health you really need it.
>And this is why skilled people can't find a job
Which is a good thing because it makes it affordable for startups to hire skilled people.
If you're looking for technical work and are really getting rejected because of something at the culture-fit level (which is where "agreeableness" falls), I'd say it's less likely that you're insufficiently kiss-ass/agreeable, and more likely that you're being identified as "potential problem teammate" material for other reasons.
To get a job you don’t have to agree to the nth degree with everything that’s said to you. You just have to be a nice more-or-less qualified person who’s enjoyable to be around and communicate with. That’s a foreign concept to many people (not just programmers) so they look for some “trick” like never disagreeing.
It’s even better that this trick makes them feel better about being a miserable wet blanket because they’re putting one over on the interviewers.
If you mention reservations about either, that's going to cost you.
It's brutal.
Here’s a question for you: What are the benefits of being watched all the time?
I understand that from the employee’s perspective they might not like being watched all the time and that it can affect their behavior. It can also prevent them from doing their best work.
That said, there are reasons why an employer would want to watch their employees all the time. If the employee dislikes it enough and thinks they have better options, they can stop working there.
The only reasons an employer has to constantly be watching relate to paranoia or micromanagement, i.e. a lack of trust in the professionalism and competence of their employees. This is abysmal and the employee quitting or not is unrelated, much as how bullying is bad even if technically an employee can quit. Not to mention that quitting is not an optional for everyone, depending on their circumstances.
I think there's a middle path and I think I'd try to apply it interviews, rather than "just" daily life and work, and that's to assume there's something of value where the other party is coming from, and use your creative powers to try to find that value. Make an attempt to understand the other party with an understanding that your thought process may have to play with things it reactively thinks are bad and solve within that framework before either rejecting the bad thing or finding out it's wrong.
Don't blanket accept or reject their mission statement or tech stack, come with a creative curiosity about it.
If people will actively seeking other teams because of a new member’s personality, it’s something you can bet will be looked for look for in an interview.
Another dimension of the "it depends" response to this is seniority.
If you're relatively junior, or will appear relatively junior based on your resume, don't express strong disagreement, but rather eagerness to learn. The team wants you to be someone who can contribute, and help them make progress towards their current goals. You're not there to re-evaluate decisions about their stack based on the glimpses get you get during the interview process.
But if you're quite senior, the team perhaps wants you to help them level up or improve. Agreeing with everything would also suggest you don't have something new to contribute that helps take them beyond the track they're on now. Don't disagree without a good reason, and be able to explain your thinking. Ask questions before you arrive at a position. Understand why the fence is there before you advocate its removal. But insightful, constructive "disagreement" can still be a way to demonstrate the value you'll bring.
bad: I disagree with the way this is done/this is just bad. Lets do X!
good: I see the motivation with the current approach and understand the goals but i wonder if we might be better served by doing X instead. Usually this allows for Y benefits, but I'm open to discussion here.
Add some fluff to ensure nobody gets defensive and articulate your flexibility (even if you don't really have it)
Sometimes the boss has a bad idea, if you're the tech guy it is your responsibility to decide if it has legs or it's a waste of time. Many consultants say yes to anything because even wild-goose chases are billable. But honesty and integrity tend to pay off in the long run, IME.
As somebody who only does technical interviews, I must say, you better cut that crap out before you get to me. Because I just puked a little.
A candidate that is energetic, excited, and passionate about programming. Practice this in front of the mirror. Record yourself.
Why should I hire you if you don't like my mission, my tech stack or my culture when there are clearly a bunch of talented people who do like all of them?
Would it not serve both of us for you to shut up, be grateful for the work while you keep looking for that perfect fit? Or even better, just keep looking and I'll keep looking for someone who genuinely likes the way we do things.
I am getting flooded with offerings but just for the "Stay in your cubicle and write code for a boring company, but we have a pingpong table so we're super fun" cringe jobs. It's like recruiters have to make some dumb quota to make and just spam everyone. Nobody truely cares anymore. Engineers are really desired and recruiters know that, but they also kinda judge you negatively for it. Like smiling at you but hating your guts at the same time. (A lot of recruiters where hired during covid19 to find SEs)
Others want to make you pass 25 different psychological and programming tests that have absolutely nothing to do with the actual job, and some you have a great conversation with but never hear back from
It sucks. Big time.
Pretty close if not the truth.
There have been thousands of layoffs in the tech world in the past few months, valuations of the biggest companies on the planet have been halved. Winter is coming.
The last few years of near million dollar compensation for engineers is the anomaly, not the norm. You're going to have to adapt. But summer will arrive again one day.
What’d important to know is right now is a critical point before trends show how bad things may get. During this period companies tend to hold their breathe.
Of course, usually most companies will backfill for positions so you can find those even during a freeze.
It was peculiar. I had to fill internal CV on their system too, with more details than the original.
First they decided to hire me for a customer instead of internally saying the customer needs 2 weeks to answer, then getting rejected because "something changed" and customer is looking for Senior+ (wtf??).
Same thing with other customers until finally nothing left, and we love you please let us know if we should contact you next year for further offer, as it takes too long.
If you're going through interviews which are going perfectly and companies are backing out at the final stage with weird excuses which don't make sense, you could be in the same situation as me. I'd recommend to NOT apply for any big corporation or VC-backed startup; only apply for bootstrapped startups; you will save yourself a lot of time. Some of these bootstrapped startups are very successful/profitable and growing quickly.
I had a lot of weird stuff happening to me. One big name company I was interviewing with (and perfectly matched for) seemed very interested to recruit me; they told me they had several different possible roles open for me and already hinted to a high salary... Then after the final interview (which seemed to have gone very well), I got an email saying "The role has been filled." - Whatever happened to all the other roles they said I would be suitable for? I had wasted hours on a challenging tech test (which I aced) and did 3 interviews - I thought the final interview was meant to be a formalty. Sometimes I think that maybe I've been blacklisted by big tech.
I would guess that one of the many people you interviewed with decided they didn't like you. That would shut down the whole process and give you no meaningful explanation. I think it's an example of how hiring is really quite bad, hard and bears little relationship to performance.
I think I do well on both technical tests and the conversational side. I'm basing that on ratio of offers.
It's based on people assuming that others will use that veto reasonably. Company i work for had a veto system but i don't think it was ever used. It was also essentially 3 level system "hire", "probably not" and "i object to this person ever working at this company"
I've heard the latter being expressed a few times but only with candidates that nobody was keen on.
Is there a particular place where you go to find these?
I was thinking about creating something similar for ages, regardless of profitability or money. There are so many great companies out there.
Hiring is broken; very many reasons for it; I suspect many of these companies aren't actually hiring but haven't yet figured out that it's uncool to waste everyone's time pretending.
A lot of LinkedIn recruiters and even people off HN job threads wasting my time. Contacting me, great interview, saying I'm a perfect candidate, and then ghosting me. That or I must have become really terrible at interviewing and reading people.
Freelance job boards are useless unless you're a junior React dev or want to get into a Web3 crypto startup. I've been out of the job hunting circus for a while, and it's been dire.
That said, I asked a little too much for a position at a dream company I always wanted to work for, but at least they graciously came back to me to say "we would have hired you, but your salary expectation are a way out of our budget so we went for someone else." Oh well, live and learn. The economy's a little tight these days, so one needs to adjust their rates accordingly.
You may have more success if you can identify and move into a role that requires, and values, 15+ years of experience - probably management of some sort.
That's been pretty almost every interview for me. The ones I get further are the ones where I can answer every question right (or are a bit more relaxed, which has been the exception, not the norm). If I get a single question wrong (or struggle somehow) but otherwise did well, I often don't get the benefit of the doubt and get passed over.
Fastest and most obvious 'getting disqualified for giving one incorrect answer' was when I was called for a technical phone screen for Facebook (many years ago, probably a decade ago at this point) by someone who sounded like they didn't understand anything technical, just had three trivia cards provided by someone on the engineering team with the question and a single term answer.
I was told 'correct' after my first two questions, then after the third question, I answered it in a general sense but without using the term that was apparently printed on their card, was told "Wrong, the answer is blah, thank you for your time." And I got a rejection email a few days later. I was only asked those three questions, nothing more.
I don't remember what the answer was anymore, but something like "toll booth messenging" something like that, it was for an iOS position, I was a lead developer of a small team and had released a half dozen games and apps on the app store already, including one I developed from scratch[1]. Still quite proud of a platforming game called Tracklapse and wish the company was still around and the game still on the store[2].
I don't really do iOS development much anymore, except working on a Swift game for a while that I eventually abandoned (working on something cross-platform now), so I don't really remember what the answer was anymore. A quick google search didn't bring up anything obvious.
[1]: https://youtu.be/uy08ohBLGhE [2]: https://youtu.be/BJ3NNLnKPdQ
I'm working on new versions now but I keep changing scope and platforms when I should just focus on getting something out there again. Proximity 2 iOS code would require too much reworking of the graphics (2D pre-Retina) and the codebase to be worth it at this point.
I also released Proxmity 2 on Xbox Live Indie Games on the Xbox 360, but then the XNA framework died (I probably could have released Proximity 2 a couple of years earlier even, but I got a job working for a small video game publisher that was considering publishing Proximity as an official Xbox Live title, but while I did end up working on an Xbox Live game as a producer while working there (Double D Dodgeball), it wasn't anywhere near as well received, for various reasons, one of which being that it relied heavily on its online mode and we had unexpected network issues at launch that weren't present when testing on Xbox's sandbox network[2].
I left Proximity 2's code dormant for a long while, then a couple years ago I tried converting it to Monogame and was surprised how easy it was to do so, spent some time upgrading various things in it (upgraded from 720p to 1080p graphics, localization support, 6 player support, reworked map selection screen, some other enhancements).
I was getting a little frustrated with scaling of the 2D graphics for different resolutions, though, and eventually decided to just make the leap from 2D to 3D and rewrote it from scratch with that in mind. Wanted to rework it to be friendly for Twitch streamers (let hundreds of people play in Twitch chat along with a streamer), but that just ballooned the scope again, trying to just get what I've got working with pass and play or bot players like Proximity 2 and get it up as an alpha game on Steam.
Proximity 2 probably could be released on Steam in the meantime I guess, but it wouldn't have some features people would probably expect from Steam games, like achievements and whatnot, because I really don't want to sink too much extra time into it considering the 3D version is coming along and should eventually have all the same features (and more).
I also have a basic Pico-8 version I never quite finished so I didn't release (I probably should do that) and I spent a weekend porting that to PlayDate, but I'm holding off on releasing that until I get my PlayDate console shipped to me and try it out. The graphics on it are extremely basic though, I kind of feel like I should spend more time on them, especially with other quite pretty puzzle games other devs had made on the Playdate already, but I should also not just sit on the game either, like I did on all the other platforms.
I also let myself get distracted with working on a Unity version for a little bit, because I really wanted to make a VR friendly version, and came up with a bunch of clever things to make the game deeper (multiple territories, resources, supplies, squads with special troops, etc), but I decided that's just asking for another couple of years of development and I can always do that after I get the other game out there.
Also the success of Wordle (and my day job making React apps) made me want to make a simple web version again. One of these weeks I might sit down and knock that out. Not sure if I should use Phaser game framework or try to just use javascript and CSS like Wordle did. It's easier to manipulate square grids with CSS than hex grids, though, so I'm leaning towards Phaser.
Part of the reason it's been so long is I spent about 5 years pursuing board game design instead of coding games in my spare time. I struggled to find publishers willing to sign my games, though, despite being a finalist in a couple game design competitions. I did get ...
The Newgrounds version worked fine for me to get a feel for the game. Once I got playing I realized it was quite familiar and that I had played it before, just many, many years ago, so thanks for the nostalgia!
I also feel the same way about getting all but one question. I usually make it all the way to the end of a really grueling process before getting rejected.
Never really had to use it myself, at least IIRC, but I was aware of the concept generally. But because I didn't answer by saying 'Toll-Free Bridging', I was done.
[1]: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Ge...
One very simple example which can result in a good candidate who got far through the process hitting a wall is that a key person in the company became overwhelmed with something unrelated. Suddenly they don't have the bandwidth (or have left the company perhaps), and the progress is now halted. That's just one little common example, but there are so many more. Unless you have an insider who can investigate, you just don't know. Wondering is futile, especially as many of us assume it was some failure of our own which caused the process to end.
In the last year I had several very promising applications which went through multiple phases, all seemingly very positive, which ended abruptly and shockingly (with a "Sorry").
From the other side, we have seen posts here on HN where the person says, "I applied to 100 jobs and this is what happened." If you take a shotgun approach, you absolutely will get something. There are many problems with this approach, especially if you are more senior and have opinions about things. For example, there may be some industries or companies which you would not work for regardless of the money. There are also some companies that you know would be horrible to work for, so you would skip those.
It is possible some of us filter out possible companies a bit too heavily, building our hopes on 1-3. And 1-3 is not a big enough set to reliably make it to the end.
My new strong feeling is that those of us with a little runway (as in 1-3 months, not "rich") should just find a personal passion project and build it. Then maybe the project makes money, or maybe it's just a showpiece to pass some of the dumber interview processes which want you to solve unrealistic CS300 level algorithm tests in a crappy web UI with a timer and audience.
But I totally relate about the feeling. Just one of several examples: There's a company that advertises jobs on HN at least once a month. They are hiring many people for this role. I went through two verbal interviews, two live coding test interviews, and finally an interview with the CTO (or at least the tech guy responsible for a big chunk of the devs in the company). Then I got a no. Either I offended the guy (which seemed difficult to do as he showed up to the interview apparently disinterested and unable/unwilling to ever look at me in the camera), or I failed earlier in the process and nobody stopped the show. But given how simple the programming challenges were and how I was able to suggest multiple solutions, I don't think it was that. So I was baffled. I have more stories not so different. You just _never_ know wtf is going on.
Flexport? I had the same experience.
But to be fair, I also worked for an "AI" startup which was going to revolutionize a certain type of business payment processing system with AI, but in fact it was just another paypal or stripe.
Talk big, and maybe if you get enough funding and have enough time you can actually fulfill the promises you've made. If not, maybe you can at least get a nice exit. $$$.
Indeed, I also found it surprising that it wasn’t as automated as they hype it to be. Felt mostly like a glorified CRM, which I guess in the shipping industry of pen & paper is seen as a massive improvement.
Lastly, It seems kinda obvious that if you aren't going to hire people to grow into the role then you attract people that already know everything about the role, which mostly then leads to the money hopping that some employers comment on. Why stay at my current company if I can do the same thing elsewhere for more.
A few tips I've picked up when interviewing (your experience may vary*):
* This is all based on having the runway the OP posted above. If you really need the job you might just have to "play" the game.You could also consider trying to find a niche and start building a product or service. Maybe for a bootstrapped startup in a related business so there is a little pay, but make it clear that you are building a tool to sell to everyone.