Totally identify with this. Years back I worked at a company called Red Gate for nearly 10 years. Latterly, old-timers at the company - including myself - used

Totally identify with this. Years back I worked at a company called Red Gate for nearly 10 years. Latterly, old-timers at the company - including myself - used to joke that we'd never get through the present-day tech interview. The impression was only heightened by a stint in recruitment where I realised, out of the hundreds of software engineer applications I was reviewing every month, >80% were rejected at first sift, and 80% of the rest were rejected at the coding assessment stage. If you actually made it to first interview there was a 40% chance you'd be offered a job, which is not terrible odds compared with where it had been. We'd hire about one out of every hundred applicants [1]. When it came time for me to move on I was, of course, terrified, because I hadn't updated my CV or gone for a job interview in 10 years, and I now knew from an insider's perspective exactly how ruthless the process can be. [1] I did actually change the hiring process to try to give candidates a more humanised experience[2], but this didn't change the 100:1 ratio. [2] Part of the motivation here was selfish: I realised that the way we had been doing it was making me short-tempered and miserable, and turning me into a worse human being.