> I don't really know how "senior" normal senior job is. At startups, "senior" can mean you've worked at one other company before. At big companies, "senior"

> I don't really know how "senior" normal senior job is. At startups, "senior" can mean you've worked at one other company before. At big companies, "senior" means you have 20 years of experience in the real world. At medium companies, "senior" can be anywhere in-between. > hired based on credentials/past work yet. Most cargo cult hiring practices these days only focus on one 20 minute coding session to evaluate you. Few companies consider any past accomplishments in immediate hiring decisions. It's kinda sad. > living in REPL and Emacs That's the killer right there. Most people code by "write code, see if it works, write more code." But during an interview, they want you to write a complete working theoretic algorithm with no "it works" feedback. So, you're constantly under pressure of a persistent, and growing, doubt about "does this thing even work? I can't run it in this shared document!" Coding interviews are a teaching position not a coding evaluation. It really doesn't make sense to evaluate a programmer on how well they operate while being immediately judged based on what they type. I'm paid for _results_, not my flailing process that kinda makes everybody look incompetent anyway. There's no solution for you besides interview at 10+ places. Employers think they are special (above you) and they think interview candidates are disposable. Employers aren't there to treat you with respect or kindness as a candidate, they are there to see if you are one of the 0.0001% top people in the world, even though after you get hired, you'll probably be doing the same CRUD work and email writing as someone who doesn't even know what a for loop does.