When you're freelancing you're essentially interviewing for your job every single minute you're in front of or have an active project with the client. Soft skills and doing work that has nothing to do with engineering is even more of a requirement.
Now soft skills are different and 2 of us are good at those and one of us is really bad; so we hire out based on the client, wishes and need for soft skills and a lot of communication overhead or not. And I agree that needs to be a match, however I cannot see how that requires 6-8 gruelling interviews spread over weeks instead of 15 minutes and a portfolio (which is how we get hired).
So yeah, I think OP would do better in a small collective of freelancers or even small consultancy company; I find it much easier to get into anywhere that way than the employee route.
In my experience, it is now about knowing how to do these things but when to reach for them when solving a problem.
They want to know if you have studied the fundamentals, so you at least have a chance of understanding whatever you are going to be copy-pasting from Stack Overflow.
I've gone the route of avoiding typical interviews altogether by leaning into my network for opportunities.
There are plenty of places where I think I'd like to work, where I'd be very motivated, and where I'd make an impact to the organization, but I'll never bother because their interview style is bad.
> have a chance of understanding whatever you are going to be copy-pasting from Stack Overflow.
And, frankly, I avoid all of this because what you've said here is exactly the sort of place where I don't want to work.
While their process might be arbitrary, it tries to ensure that entrants can comfortably think about and select appropriate data structures and algorithms for problems, on demand.
In most cases, prepping for this feels like rote memorization, but through that process you start to build an intuition that helps you be more efficient at pattern matching and isolating the constraints/bottlenecks. And you've proven that you can learn and apply the algos. It's not the most fun of interview styles, but it does work for them.
So what’s the 6 week interview for? To recognise talent? Sure I can see that in a junior a bit (but I doubt you find out more in the all those interviews than a 15 minute chat, at least that’s my experience; you will actually need to hire and try them on a project in the team to know their feel for it all) but in a senior that’s the portfolio again.
To me it feels that we are starting in a position where the interviewer assumes I lied about everything I sent in and this all is to prove myself (again and again). I am not in kindergarten; I have decades of experience in huge project; good luck finding a stooge who likes abusive relations.
It does feel like the balance of power in these interviews is way out of whack, but that's what you get when there's way more applicants than open roles. If you're a developer with a good reputation, sometimes you can skip most of the red tape [1]. That bar is extremely high, though.
The most compelling argument I've heard is "we get so many applicants at $bigcompany that we need a fast and objective way to filter people out". And sure, that works, but think of the masses of great people you're turning off with that approach? Most great devs I know won't put up with that crap, including myself. Not a problem if you've optimized your company to build masses of code with early-career employees I suppose.
Knowing the tradeoffs we're making in data structures and having a broad understanding of different algorithms to throw at a problem is very handy. It's also almost completely unnecessary at the typical web shop (like you say). I use these things a bit in my work (not the typical web shop), but mostly indirectly via DBs and similar tools where I need to understand the tradeoffs. I'm certainly not implementing anything with red/black trees, making my custom bloom filters, etc. We have an ecosystem of tools for a reason, that would be silly to reinvent the wheel everywhere without a damn good reason.
BINGO.
I'm good at the job and good at normal interviews. I more-or-less enjoy both, even. I like talking to clients, and I'm good at it. I can sell myself. And I can do the work.
Specifically software developer interviews practically make me hyperventilate and break out in hives. Fuck that. A pop quiz over a huge potential space, probably over something I will never in my life actually use on the job, to be solved live while people watch and judge me? Oh my god, no. No. Why the shit that's considered acceptable in a world where we're so touchy-feely that projects are supposed to have Codes of Conduct is beyond me. It's straight-up abuse.
You can find recruiters that will clip a small fee and dump you through a contractor management platform. It's all automated. You're effectively a freelancer, still need to sell yourself a bit to get hired but the recruiter vets leads on both ends to streamline things.
Contracts are short and sweet so it's not like interviews are multiround or anything, 15 minute coffee with the client to check if you're aligned on stack / interest and off you go.
Early in my career I worked for a consulting firm as an employee, and I never found out exactly what I was billed at but I'm guessing it was around double what I was paid. We worked on site at our client's office, and people there called us "contractors," but we were employees of the consuting firm. We had benefits, training, overtime pay, etc. and we got paid our salary between jobs when we were not on a client project.
If I were an indepenedent contractor using an agency to find work, I'd expect them to take a much lower cut, as they have much lower overhead and risk.
But rather that set of weird, contrived rituals (which pretend to measure soft and other skills, but basically don't really measure anything other than the candidate's ability to game up answers to questions they looked up on the internet) -- not to mention the frequently appalling lack of decency, common courtesy (and common sense) has come to stand to in for the interview process these days.
There is one significant difference. In this perpetual interview, you have access to the internet and can find factual answers from there.
The problem solving part is what makes someone a good engineer/scientist. Not knowing particular algorithms, or knowing formulas (in case of DL jobs).
Interviews focus on the wrong things.
I am okay with the perpetual interview as long as I don't have to rote memorize a bunch of stuff like some poor middle-schoolers in 1970s communist country.
I threw away many recruiters who even mentioned technical interviews. I am doing more than okay financially and career-wise, btw.
This might change in the future just as a step to do something I want to do. I will hate all the interview, HR initiation, onboarding, etc. forever.
In interviews for full-time employment, this has rarely been the case.