I recently quit my job because of burnout and management problems. Since then, I applied to 39 jobs. I pulled out of the process with four, 34 rejected me, and the last one was the offer I accepted. Out of the 34 that rejected me, 11 rejected me after a full loop. I don't know what was more insulting, doing 11 full loops (3 of which required air travel!) without getting an offer, or getting rejected by 23 companies without even reaching the full loop step.
Big companies have fixed interview processes that are designed to weed out false positives at the expense of having a lot of false negatives. Startups by and large don't know WTF they are doing when it comes to hiring. Companies in the middle deceive themselves into thinking they have a process when they really don't know what they're doing. Some companies experiment with their hiring process, which is a lot like not knowing what you're doing except they get usable data out of it afterwards (at the expense of you, the applicant). And some companies don't even have a clear idea of what roles they need to hire for when they bring you to a full loop. Twice I've received interview feedback to the effect of, "we like you, but we can't actually move forward with the role we interviewed you for because we lost budget/want to rework the role requirements".
If you're interviewing with places like Google and Amazon, you're in a career that pays six figures. A six figure career isn't treated like a five figure career, and tech is a pathological example of this. Most six figure careers--doctor, dentist, longshoreman--have some sort of barrier to entry where you go through years of hazing, high expenses, and unreliable income. Other six figure careers are really just the top of a five figure career. With tech, I don't know how it is if you have some sort of marker that you've already been through years of expensive hazing (i.e. a degree from MIT or CMU) but for a guy like me who went to a mid-rate state university, there's the same instinct to have a high barrier to entry but instead of making that barrier to entry something that you can spend a few years climbing through, it's a gigantic wall that you get one chance to jump over. And that wall is the interview process.
Big companies have fixed interview processes that are designed to weed out false positives at the expense of having a lot of false negatives. Startups by and large don't know WTF they are doing when it comes to hiring. Companies in the middle deceive themselves into thinking they have a process when they really don't know what they're doing. Some companies experiment with their hiring process, which is a lot like not knowing what you're doing except they get usable data out of it afterwards (at the expense of you, the applicant). And some companies don't even have a clear idea of what roles they need to hire for when they bring you to a full loop. Twice I've received interview feedback to the effect of, "we like you, but we can't actually move forward with the role we interviewed you for because we lost budget/want to rework the role requirements".
If you're interviewing with places like Google and Amazon, you're in a career that pays six figures. A six figure career isn't treated like a five figure career, and tech is a pathological example of this. Most six figure careers--doctor, dentist, longshoreman--have some sort of barrier to entry where you go through years of hazing, high expenses, and unreliable income. Other six figure careers are really just the top of a five figure career. With tech, I don't know how it is if you have some sort of marker that you've already been through years of expensive hazing (i.e. a degree from MIT or CMU) but for a guy like me who went to a mid-rate state university, there's the same instinct to have a high barrier to entry but instead of making that barrier to entry something that you can spend a few years climbing through, it's a gigantic wall that you get one chance to jump over. And that wall is the interview process.