tl;dr Have a zen attitude about getting turned down. The best companies in the world are still spectacularly bad at technical interviews. Whew, reading these a

tl;dr Have a zen attitude about getting turned down. The best companies in the world are still spectacularly bad at technical interviews. Whew, reading these answers is depressing. Not because of any of the answers that anyone has given (they are mostly good) but because it's a reminder of the state of both software engineering interviews and the state of the JS ecosystem. I recently started a company but before that I was at a company that would be considered by most to be top-tier amongst places that create web based software. After leaving that job I interviewed at and received offers from several other places that are top tier by SV standards (think GooAmaFaceSoft and their similarly hyped but non-public peers). One of the interviews was over coffee because networking really is the bees knees (there were further rounds involving actual programming). While it started as a fairly straightforward "tell me about…" interview, we eventually got to just chatting as peers in the industry. One of the points of discussion was the state of interviewing technical candidates. I've interviewed >150 candidates over the past 8 years. I'm opinionated about all sides of the process and I think I as well as the rest of the industry have a lot to learn. In a moment of candor I said to the person across the table something along the lines of "I'm very confident in the fact that I'm a great engineer overall and that I'm particularly skilled and highly marketable as a JS dev because that's what I've been focused on for the past five years. That said, throughout these interviews, I wouldn't be surprised if I get an offer from about 50% of my interviews." The person who has sat down to interview me and would later give me an amazing job offer mostly agreed with my statement. They tried to be comforting asserting that it would probably be a little more than half. In the end I got offers from 3 out of 5. All three of the offers were had a first year take home north of 2x my previous salary. None of this is an indictment of the companies that turned me down, I just think it's worth saying to someone prepping for interviews that there's a strong chance that you'll get turned down. You might truly bomb and interview and you might walk away thinking you nailed it only to learn that they didn't feel the same way. Don't let it get to your too much. Zen mode, enabled.