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Or, the simpler explanation, loads of people applied for the job, and she was statistically unlikely to get it regardless of her applicability.

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Yup. It gets a bit annoying when people try to figure out why they didn't get the job.

The answer is always that someone else was preferred over you. You usually can't know if your interview performance was a determining factor.

For what it's worth, this is not true at large tech companies. There isn't a fixed number of job openings, and candidates aren't compared with each other. Instead, there is a bar that interviews must meet, and any candidate that passes that bar gets an offer.

While theoretically it's true, it's not true in practice. I worked in two big tech corporations and in both all interviewers who did more than 15-20 interviews converged to 50%/50% hire/reject ratio. Candidates are not compared directly to each other, their performance at interview is still compared to average performance.

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