https://www.google.com/search?q=bob+firestone+job+interview+...

I was having trouble with interviews circa 2006 and I bought his course and it was a great investment.

Also keep in mind it could be as simple as that they had a better candidate.

Also, having been on both sides, I can tell you that hiring is just a crap shoot. My (anecdotal!) experience is that a lot of hiring is e8ther 50% gut feelings-based or 50% keyword-based. And in the worse case, both.

From my POV, if you don’t have any strong signals about why you were rejected, I would just move on rather than trying to infer the reason.

Now, I've had a few strange things myself with interviews. Except for the company I ended work for, all other were a disaster. Everyone from HR knew 0 about Linux or programming. One guy was really dumb. We talked about bash for Linux and at the end he starts reading his notes and says "Sad you did not talk about scripting in Linux..." and I just went "Ok bye bye".

You sound unsure and defeated in your post. Were you feeling confident the day of the interview, or do you think you seemed desperate for the job?

I will say that all the best technical interviews I have had are ones where I spoke in short sentences, was able to end on a point rather than rambling, and left plenty of time in my answers to ask questions of the reviewer and demonstrate curiosity.

There are probably 300 people interviewing for the job you interviewed for. So they need to not just pick someone who checks the boxes, but the BEST of all the people who checked the boxes.

Assuming you checked all the boxes, you weren't the best and someone else was chosen. That's all it is. What makes them the best? Who knows. There's likely 50 of them they had to choose from.

Job hunting has always been a numbers game but now it's worse by a factor of 100x. Don't take it personally, and keep going.

You don't have to be 100% sure about what it is personality-wise that you need to tune up to start making changes. You're an intelligent agent; your intuition is much better than random about things like this. I would say act on your intuitions about what specifically you are going that is rubbing them the wrong way, and be less like that - regress a little to the mean, in other words. This is generally good advice in the business world, even if it isn't good advice for e.g. becoming a celebrity on Twitter.

Take note that most psychological studies suggest that personality is very unlikely to change dramatically in adulthood no matter what you do. It's better to focus on techniques that let you chill out for a few hours/days/weeks than it is to try to actually change who you are at core.

There might be a middle ground between "technical skills" and "personality", though, which we do take into account, falling under "soft skills", which may be affected by certain personality traits. Things like polling the interviewer for their thoughts, asking thoughtful questions, being curious about the source of disagreement or misunderstanding, not being dogmatic, and so on. I think it can be harder to demonstrate these kinds of skills with certain personality types -- I used to be very nervous in interviews, and it wasn't always easy to have the presence of mind to exercise these soft skills.

But even still, at least in technical interviews like programming or system design (as opposed to cross-functional/manager/tech leadership interviews), I've found it relatively rare for a candidate to be rejected for 'soft skill' failures when the right signals are there for technical strength.

And, as others have said... this rejection might have nothing to do with you. If they had 1000 applications, and you were their choice above 998 of them, you still get the rejection because they hired the person who was above 999 of them.

If it was just one company, I wouldn’t start trying to change who you are. If you make up a new personality for the interview and get the job, then what? How long can you keep the character going? Do you want to work with people you can’t be yourself around?

In terms of what to possibly change, that’s almost impossible to say without seeing what you’re like in an interview.

In the most common case where I see engineers who say they struggle with the soft skills parts of interviewing, the underlying issue is a lack of skill in communication - working out what's important, stating it clearly and concisely, and in a way appropriate to the audience. I read some of your blog and found it pleasantly chatty, well structured, and obviously technical. If you communicate like you do in writing, there is obviously no problem there. I have no doubt that your account of performing well on technical questions is correct. However...

After some quick google searches, what I did find in your digital footprint is:

- A relatively high number of online posts complaining about employers in general across several years

- A tweet from a few years ago where you say you're fed up of software engineering but are forced to stick with it

- (as you stated) a jumpy work history

My best guess is that you're failing the digital footprint check. If I was hiring and post interview was doing a little more digging on candidates to help do a final pick, I would look at the short tenures, the outwardly directed frustration at employers, the stated lack of desire to be a software engineer at all, and pass on you.

As for why this is happening after several technical interviews? Most likely that's when you undergo final background checks and get cut out of the process. If you are burned out, sick of workplace social narratives, and don't want to work as a software engineer, I sincerely empathise for you. However: don't let me, a random hacker news commenter, find that out in under 2 minutes of time spent on Google.

The problem with advice here is that, if you're right and there's something personality-related and it's not just fierce competition or tiny sample size, we can't really tell through a post. I'm talking about the je ne sais quoi of you, the body language, the attitude, the unwritten vibe you give off, and posting videos here is uh, well, yeah, unlikely.

So, I'd echo the advice of others to talk to your friends and ask them to give you feedback. Hopefully they're observant and willing to be blunt.

I'll opine, though - have you tried a little masking and humility? I ask because if I had to guess based on probability, the archetype of the highly intelligent, technically excellent nerd tends to also run adjacent to underdeveloped social skills, or at least indifference to using them. Arrogance, defensiveness, ego abound. That's what I coach my team and friends on who have cracked this type of discussion open.

If you were going to mask for an interview, coming across humble/hungry/smart (smart is probably not a problem for most here, but humble?...). Consider mirroring with the interviewer. Stay detached and practice this, especially when a finger is pointed at you or you don't ace a question, or they disagree.

In all, it's probably the stuff you can't describe easily without being next to you. You may not even realize the signals you're putting off, if that is even what's going on.

I know the struggle - my wife has been turned down over and over and over, and she takes it personally, but she's also going for jobs that clearly have tons of great applicants. Is it her attitude? Did she make a mistake bringing up that experience? Or maybe...or maybe it's just out of our control, and we have to stick to the plan and stay in the market. The losing move is not to play.

Do you. You're the only one who can do it as well as you do.

Well I see the problem already.

On topic: this job market is a complete circus and I wouldn't gleam any rejections as it having anything to do with any factor you can control. So many jobs just disappeared for me mid-interview, with a few ending up as ghosts after 4-5 rounds. There's interviews where I do well but it's clear they had someone else in the pipeline with double my experience. Recruiter disrespect is also at very high levels and you'll be rejected for reasons they cannot legally disclose. Then there's the whole outsourcing issue and how the interview never intended to hire you, even if you were the perfect candidate.

Maybe one day we'll have a sane market again thst hires on the quality of the candidate. But that's not 2025.

Maybe you need to work on soft skills, learn on how to read other's expectations, so that you can dynamically adapt your strategy to meet their expectations.

For what it is worth in my recent experience most interviewers have commented about how pleasant and likable I am before they reject me, usually for some perceived technical flaw such as not realizing the essence of software quality is embracing their favorite fuzzing solution.

Multiple times we rejected strong senior devs because of that. It could be things like: - language issues eg. we have to repeat questions multiple times - bad team players eg. they feel close minded, they seem judgemental

On the other hand, we recruited juniors who were not great technically but who had a positive mindset and the potential to grow. And I think they were the best people we hired.

You'll never know the real reason you weren't hired anyway, so it doesn't make sense trying to focus on changing something that you don't know is a problem to begin with. You're assuming it is personality, but it could also be other things related or not to you.

Interviewing is ultimately a numbers game; you can get better at it (with the myriad interview-prep materiel out there), but you are still subject to various uncontrollable factors. The most significant thing you can do is apply to more jobs, and thus increase your odds of getting hired.

From their perspective, they might be interviewing, say, six people. As you say, they've already weeded out people from their resumes before they even get to the interview. From my experience, and I have heard people note this before, interviews tend to be a Gaussian curve with a normal distribution. People are weeded out by resumes and such. However, if I interview six people, usually someone slips through the cracks who knows nothing or next to nothing. That leaves the remaining five.

Of the five, four are usually interchangeable. They're like you - they get the technical questions right, or right enough. It's obvious they've been writing features for code for a company like yours. But of the five, often one person seems to not just know the easiest questions, or normal questions, but has a very good understanding of the subject matter. You keep probing how much they know, and they have in-depth knowledge about a lot of things. They know how registers on a processor work, they know about cache, they know the big O space of various algorithms, they can explain different approaches to concurrency in depth, or testing, or a lot of things. So you got the answers right, they just did better.

It could be something else - you might be just as good as someone else, but they were recommended by someone already on the team, or on an adjacent team, and they get brought in.

I guess personalities are on a bell curve as well. Maybe one out of six people fail on this. Maybe they're disorganized, or immature, or arrogant. Sometimes they miss basic social cues, or don't follow instructions, or even seem like they have a screw loose. Then four out of six people seem nice enough - professional but friendly. Then maybe one out of six just seems very sharp and smart, or avuncular, or what have you. A lot of it ties together - someone who has done the work to learn a programming language more than the other candidates, you assume is going to be hard-working on features as well, and they also seem sharp because they know so much (about IT, but other things as well).

Some things are contrasting. The hard-working person who knows the programming language in and out, and who gets a lot of feature work done is probably willing to sacrifice a little comity within the group to get a feature out. On the other hand, some people are so stubborn and argumentative, their presence would be a negative, even if they have technical skills. But some personality traits can contrast - I've working with friendly, supportive leads with great technical skills, but if they are a little bit hard charging this type of thing might be expected to come with the package of being very good technically.

I stay interviewing while I have a job so the consequences aren’t as large but over on cscareers and blind, many people have the same experience

I wouldn’t over think this from one employer

Until you have someone with nothing to lose giving you brutally honest feedback, you won't know what the issue is. Years ago I had thought I passed technical interviews but I had given non optimal code.

I had one mock interviewer (paid) tell me I wasn't explaining my solutions enough and I needed to take charge of the conversation more.

Invest some time into finding out what your real weaknesses are.