I wouldn’t say it’s unique but usually people my age get hired at higher levels but I purposefully didn’t want that. I studied my ass off, I did I think 400 LC

I wouldn’t say it’s unique but usually people my age get hired at higher levels but I purposefully didn’t want that. I studied my ass off, I did I think 400 LC questions and did many other interviews before this interview so I was at the top of my game. Systems design comes naturally to me, but also required practice. I arranged things so that I had all my interviews over the course of about 6-8 weeks and ordered them so that the companies I was least interested were at the beginning and the ones I cared about most were at the end. I also explicitly told them that I wanted to be interviewed at senior software engineer level, not staff or higher based on my years of experience. This worked in 2021-2022 but I don't think it works these days because this is probably the second worst job market I've seen since the dotcom bust.