Hard truths I learned when I got laid off from my SWE job

It's reflective of the type of company you're interviewing for.

I lived in Seattle for a while, and almost every startup in the area did some form of algorithm lottery interviewing, because the startups were created by ex AMZN/MS/etc employees and they just took the process they were comfortable with to the next company.

I lived in Atlanta and a few other smaller cities for a while before and after that, and no company did anything like this, because the successful tech companies were all born of people with no FAANG experience, with different backgrounds and with different experiences.

Ironically, I feel that this also helps me identify AI writing since it never shows its work; it has a tendency to mix together multiple "answers" in a swirling morass of leadership-speak (a mixture of management-adjective-soup and the avoidance of direct points). That kind of speech pattern coming from anybody that's not a C level executive stands out. Even executives tend to drop the leadership style speech patterns on forums.

Over the years:

I built a video capture system for the Commodore Amiga as a neat side project for that lead to me working on Transputers that formed the heart of a non-linear editing system (no interview)

The Transputers were really fast, so I wrote some neat 3D demos that ran on the Transputer boards in the Amiga & PC => contract work with SGI (no interview)

Wrote a demo for the SGI video capture system to scan a magazine at high resolution => machine vision & robotics that was changing the printing industry (no interview)

Wrote a C compiler for an 8-bit micro so I could learn C => leads to writing a C compiler for a 16-bit micro at a company (no interview)

Created a "smart home dashboard" for a side-project => leads to writing a mobile app to manage a WiFi router => leads to becoming Lead Firmware Engineer on the project (no interview)

I wrote some stuff on the Unity3D forums => game development job offer (no interview)

Ran a number of in-person developer meet-ups over the years => various jobs & offers & contract gigs (no interview)

Got asked by a friend to teach a class on device driver development at USC, video recorded it, he sent it to his friend at Intel => wind up teaching many, many week long, rocket-science level classes on Linux & Android & device driver development & board bring-up at Intel (no interview)

Recorded all of my lectures at Intel, shared them with a friend at Facebook who was trying to get in to device driver development => Which lead to me teaching a couple of classes at Facebook (no interview)

Asked to critique a ReactNative class at Facebook due to my other teaching there => Which lead to me consulting/contracting for Facebook for a few years (no interview)

Video tape my classes at Facebook, which get shared with people at Microsoft & Apple without my knowledge => end up consulting and teaching at both Microsoft & Apple (no interview)

Created a bot for a popular MMORPG coupled with machine vision and some AI techniques => contract job to detect bots in the self-same popular MMORPG (no interview)

I created a C# package and published it that done some fancy stuff with random numbers => company hired me to work on their project that used the library (that was an "interesting" interview)

I wrote some SONY PlayStation developer tools => leads to getting a job at a game development company creating a PSX game (no interview)

Create some tools to theme websites and pull data from a database => accidentally create an adult entertainment empire (no interview)

Document how the Gameboy works, write some developer tools, maintain some developer tools => multiple jobs developing Gameboy games (no interview)

Port MAME to a bunch of consoles, write emulators as side-projects for other consoles => hired to write emulator of their classic consoles for "big console development company" (no interview)

Hacked on some gstreamer code => connection with a guy at a Canadian who says "if you're ever looking to move to Canada..."

There's lot of other examples in my career where building a side-project leads to an interview or a straight-up offer.

As a counterpoint, I probably wouldn't dig into this too much. But even if I did, would I find it strange that someone got laid off and then used their time to build up a company that didn't work out? Probably not. And if I realized that it was a half-assed effort... so what? Why is that worse than time spent playing video games? Sure, if you told me you were working on building a company and you didn't have any progress, I might feel that you were dishonest. But if you've got at least something to show for it (a basic product, even with zero sales), I think it's fair game.