I don't think the problem the author is highlighting here actually has very much to do with recruiters. The recruiting industry _is_ full of scamminess (spam to

I don't think the problem the author is highlighting here actually has very much to do with recruiters. The recruiting industry _is_ full of scamminess (spam to both engineers and companies, false-flag recruiters who claim to represent famous companies). However, as broken as the industry is, I don't think it's behind the author's problem here. He's talking about interview randomness. He was heavily recruited by Amazon, then failed the interview. This is not a rare event. We have data on this from running Triplebyte. Almost no engineers passes all their interviews. The top cohort on Triplebyte goes on to pass about 80% of their interviews. These are strong, strong engineers (successful startup founders, ICPC national winners, Google staff engineers), and they still fail. Almost no one can consistently pass more than 80% of interviews. One reason for this is just incentives for companies. False positives (bad hires) are far more expensive to a company than false negatives (rejecting a good person). So companies rationally bias toward rejection. To a certain extend we just have to accept this as rational. (Although I do think that companies tend to assume that everyone they reject is bad, and discount the cost of false negatives). But I DO think the situation can be significantly improved. Interviewers vary significantly between companies. Some companies want everyone they hire to understand low-level systems and concurrency and thread scheduling. Others think this is irrelevant and want everyone they hire to be very fast and productive in modern web frameworks. Some think that CS is important, others think that it's bookish and irrelevant. All of this makes sense (different companies do different things). The problem is that you can't tell from the outside what a company wants to see (oddly what the company wants often has little to do with the type of engineering they're doing. It seems to just be an engineering culture that develops over time). And companies themselves often are not aware of how what they want is different from what other companies want. Each company just says that they want to hire "excellent engineers", and think that that means the same thing to them as to everyone else. It's the cognitive bias where everyone thinks that the things they are good at are the core of the discipline. This adds noise to interviews. At Triplebtye, one of the big things we do is measure this (by evaluating engineers already working at companies, and updating our model with the feedback on each candidate we send). I'd love to see this sort of approach take hold across the industry (and companies get better at advertising honestly what skills they care about).