Is it not true though that "performance" is a relatively ambiguous term that, in the context of interviewing, means only what the interviewer/company defines it to be?
If two friends with identical levels of experience in the same technology interviewed at two different arbitrary companies, both saying they performed well, but one gets the job and the other doesn't, it would be hard to say in which way performance was measured, or even how many people they'd speak to before being rejected or accepted. More often than not, nobody can or will tell them. Sometimes there's an objective measure of success in the technical step, sometimes there's not. Sometimes you think you had good chemistry because the conversation flowed fine, and you then get hit with a rejection, and it might have been that someone else got luckier than you that day, got a better sleep, answered one out of 50 questions between all interviewers in a way that was what the interviewer was looking for, went to a school that the interviewer liked instead of another one, etc..
Whether it's truly "entirely" random or not isn't the point, the point is that along with being able to demonstrate the skills you say you have, it's a multi-step series of lucky rolls all the way to the end.
In some cases, you can actually ace the technical skills portion and all of the other portions, and they'll still pick someone else because of arbitrary prejudice.
alt Hacker News
Is it not true though that "performance" is a relatively ambiguous term that, in the context of interviewing, means only what the interviewer/company defines it to be?
If two friends with identical levels of experience in the same technology interviewed at two different arbitrary companies, both saying they performed well, but one gets the job and the other doesn't, it would be hard to say in which way performance was measured, or even how many people they'd speak to before being rejected or accepted. More often than not, nobody can or will tell them. Sometimes there's an objective measure of success in the technical step, sometimes there's not. Sometimes you think you had good chemistry because the conversation flowed fine, and you then get hit with a rejection, and it might have been that someone else got luckier than you that day, got a better sleep, answered one out of 50 questions between all interviewers in a way that was what the interviewer was looking for, went to a school that the interviewer liked instead of another one, etc..
Whether it's truly "entirely" random or not isn't the point, the point is that along with being able to demonstrate the skills you say you have, it's a multi-step series of lucky rolls all the way to the end.
In some cases, you can actually ace the technical skills portion and all of the other portions, and they'll still pick someone else because of arbitrary prejudice.