Yes. If I want a job badly enough, I'm willing to spend 2 years preparing for a chance to have an interview there. For example, if I wanted to work at a top AI

Yes. If I want a job badly enough, I'm willing to spend 2 years preparing for a chance to have an interview there. For example, if I wanted to work at a top AI lab (like DeepMind, FAIR, or OpenAI), I'd better start working on a paper that gets accepted at NeurIPS, or a research project that puts me on their radar. If that's not 100% acceptable in your worldview, then perhaps you're not who they're looking for.