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Comment by pton_xd | Hacker News Reader

Who knows, maybe you never would've been a "culture fit" even if you passed the coding test. By the same logic, if only I picked 2 - 4 - 18 - 50 - 56 - 20 on Powerball last week I would be $760 million richer. It's only a few numbers to get right, wild to think I was that close to being rich!

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not even comparable. Lotto is entirely random, signals that anthropic would be hugely successful were not random, but access to the upsides were gated on who had sufficiently amassed capital to buy in

He's talking about interviews, and it seems like a very appropriate comparison. Anyone who's tried and failed the interview gauntlet at almost literally any tech company in the last decade knows that it may as well be a total roll of the dice even if you pass the technical part.

I interviewed with some random company a few years ago, I don't even remember what they did but I know they didn't pay all that well. Passed the technical, and then I needed to 5 seper calls with everyone from marketing to the CTO. Apparently they all had equal weight and I answered some question more vaguely then they'd have liked, and I got an automated rejection. Had CC everyone before I got an answer as to what the problem was. Your shot doesn't only need to be perfect, it needs to be perfect while shooting into the darkness with no glasses on.

Sometimes the dice roll is front-loaded and you happen to sail through, match the vibes, nail the technical, and the second technical, and use AI as much as they want in your workflow, and on and on

The interviews are a fair consideration but the lotto analogy is a non-sequitur. You can’t study for a lotto ticket.

Well... you're not necessarily studying for most technical interviews in the same way that you would study for a test. You're first taking a guess at what you'll be tested on, how you'll be graded, and often how much time to spend on something, then you're walking into the rest of them. A very volatile chance at every step that isn't always influenced by every former step is indeed not technically the same as a lottery, but in an abstract sense it's not so different.

What's closer to an actual lottery is getting your resume picked. Than you get to study and participate in the blind dog race

You can’t ace a test and still fail.

You can ace an interview and not get hired.

They're still performance dependent, far from entirely random.

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.

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