> I've lived both sides of this. I’ve been subjected to the mysterious whims and casual insults of the job-seeking process.
I've grown to learn that it's important to understand that interviewing in particular and job-seeking in general is not an objective and impartial process, and the output is not deterministic or reproducible. You can be hired even when there are objectively better people in the race, and you can be sidelined right on the phone screening even though you are the ideal candidate. It's a crapshoot, and the only people claiming otherwise are motivated by a mix of survivorship bias with a need to avoid recognizing that the process is flawed by nature.
> I’ve also interviewed and rejected experienced candidates who talked a great game but couldn’t demonstrate the ability to code FizzBuzz-level problems in any language.
I'm afraid that this take is also a reflection of the cargo cult mentality that plagues recruiting. I personally know FANG engineers with half a dozen years of high-profile work who had to spend weeks training coding golf and algo&data structures trivia before passing the first round of interviews, all because these trivia games bear no resemblance with real world software engineering. In fact, I will go as far as to claim that they serve more as ladder-pulling than actual technical assessments. For example, once I was automatically rejected from a C++ position to work on a desktop app because I wasn't familiar with placement new. This also extends to framework tests. I know a guy who applied for a backend position who was rejected because even though he rolled out a Spring service from scratch that passed all integration tests, the interviewer complained about how the service did not commented the controllers. These are things that takes a single comment in a PR to address. I mean, is adding a comment w challenging technical feat? But somehow some interviewers reject candidates based on this nitpicking.