When I first started interviewing, I got turned down at a lot of companies because they were concerned about my self taught background, often in spite of strong

When I first started interviewing, I got turned down at a lot of companies because they were concerned about my self taught background, often in spite of strong project work and interviews. In spite of so many rejections (2 offers after 17+ interviews), I've been wildly successful in my current job—I received a promotion in the first 6 months and have since held down tech lead roles. Look, the bottom line is that companies optimize for false negatives. In order to achieve a high accuracy rate, [tests must have exceptionally low false positive rates](https://www.math.hmc.edu/funfacts/ffiles/30002.6.shtml https://www.math.hmc.edu/funfacts/ffiles/30002.6.shtml), just based on stats. I won't work out the math for you—you sound like you're perfectly capable of plugging numbers into bayes theorem—but that implies that even very good engineers are likely to get false negative rejections at many companies. It does not mean, however, that those companies are necessarily judging you based on unfair criterion, and I don't thin it's fair, thoughtful, or mature to indicate otherwise—(especially because some of my strongest coworkers at Uber are from less prestigious schools in the midwest...)