> Like one place I did well on 3/4 coding challenges and kind of bombed the system design interview. None of these companies will look at that and say, well thi

> Like one place I did well on 3/4 coding challenges and kind of bombed the system design interview. None of these companies will look at that and say, well this person has potential let's give them a chance. They all will say, well they don't raise the bar so let's just keep our dozens of needed roles unfilled. A bad engineering hire can result in worse outcomes than leaving a role unfilled because developers exert so much leverage through software. The risk when hiring developers is that they will create highly-leveraged negative value. Taking your system design example, a poorly-designed system can: - cost millions of dollars directly by failing its functional requirements - cost millions more indirectly by being inefficient - divert energy from other initiatives to fix - dissuade other engineers from working at the company in the future By this, I don't mean to say that we should demand interviewing perfection, or that the industry's interviewing process can't be improved. But it's important to recognize that "having potential" includes the potential for both good, and dramatically bad, outcomes.