I've found that tech companies have harder interview loops for infosec than in software engineering. For software engineering, know your college algorithms and

I've found that tech companies have harder interview loops for infosec than in software engineering. For software engineering, know your college algorithms and you'll have a decent shot. For infosec, the hiring bar is entirely random. Know your algorithms as those questions are all still fair game, know an enormous and entirely random amount of security trivia as infosec has interviewers with incredible ego, be able to solve CTF challenge problems under extreme pressure in 30 minutes, be able to review code in all programming languages for security defects, etc. I recently had an interview for a IoT penetration testing role (requiring C and Python) at a large tech company. The first phone screen was an engineer on an unrelated team asking me Java OWASP Top 10 style questions. What on earth??? Apparently CTFs (which do nothing except teach you how to get better at CTFs) are the new hiring bar. God only knows what's next. So don't feel bad. Keep interviewing and you'll get lucky. Luck has far more to do with it than anything else at the moment.