Good at Software Interviewing ≠ Good at the Job
If you've been in tech long enough, you already know this, even if we all politely pretend otherwise:
Being good at software interviews is not the same thing as being good at the job.
We all nod at this like it's obvious—and then proceed to build entire hiring pipelines that assume the exact opposite.
If you've seen both sides of the table—as a candidate and as an interviewer—you've probably felt this mismatch firsthand. You've watched genuinely strong engineers struggle through interviews. You've seen others breeze through with impressive confidence… and then struggle with actual work. And at some point, you've probably asked yourself: What exactly are we measuring here?
I've been observing this system for close to a decade now, across startups, unicorns, big tech, and everything in between. The tooling has changed. The platforms have changed. The interview prep industry has exploded. But the core dynamics? Mostly unchanged.
What Actually Determines Interview Outcomes
We like to believe interviews are objective. Structured. Fair. Deterministic.
They are none of those things.
If I had to roughly decompose what determines whether you get an offer, it would look something like this:
1. Luck (often 40–50%)
This is the part we're all uncomfortable admitting.
Luck shows up everywhere:
- Which interviewer you get
- Whether they like your communication style
- Whether your strengths line up with the questions
- Whether you slept well
- Whether they slept well
- Whether the conversation "clicks"
You can do everything right and still fail. You can do many things wrong and still pass.
None of this makes preparation useless—but it does mean interviews are far noisier than we pretend.
2. Preparation (≈ 20%)
Under-preparation almost guarantees failure. Over-preparation does not guarantee success.
This asymmetry is important.
Prep helps you reduce variance. It does not eliminate it.
It makes you faster, smoother, more fluent. It helps you recognize patterns and avoid obvious mistakes. But it doesn't magically turn interviews into an accurate proxy for real-world ability.
3. Real-World Experience (variable, and oddly under-measured)
For junior roles, prep dominates.
For senior+ roles, experience should matter more—pattern recognition, judgment, knowing what can go wrong, understanding tradeoffs.
But here's the problem: most interview formats still don't measure these things well.
We often end up testing people on their ability to perform under artificial constraints, not on how they think when things are messy, ambiguous, and real.
Which is… most of the job.
4. How Much You Seem to Want the Job (≈ 5%)
Not how much you actually want it. How much you signal.
- If you come across as desperate, it hurts you.
- If you come across as disengaged, it hurts you.
- Somewhere in the middle—confident, curious, calm—is the sweet spot.
It's weird that this matters. But it does.
Interviewing Is Its Own Skill
This is the part people don't like hearing:
Interviewing is not a proxy for job performance. It is its own separate skill.
It rewards:
- Pattern recognition
- Thinking out loud
- Guessing what the interviewer wants
- Time-boxed reasoning
- Calmness under pressure
- Familiarity with common question shapes
These are useful skills.
They are just not the same skills that make someone great at building, debugging, or evolving real systems.
This is why great engineers sometimes fail interviews. This is why mediocre ones sometimes pass.
And this is why the whole thing often feels misaligned.
Why This Matters More Than People Think
Interviewing is a muscle.
The more you use it, the stronger it gets.
You get better at:
- Reading the room
- Calibrating expectations
- Handling rejection
- Predicting outcomes
- Knowing when something isn't a fit
And here's the underrated part:
This muscle gives you leverage.
It lets you:
- Escape toxic managers
- Avoid broken teams
- Negotiate from a place of confidence
- Make career moves strategically
- Stop feeling trapped
When you're bad at interviewing, you feel stuck. When you're good at it, you have options.
That doesn't make the system fair—but it does mean understanding it matters.
What This Isn't
This isn't a rant. This isn't a "how to beat the system" guide. This isn't me saying interviews are useless.
It's just an attempt to be honest about what they are—and what they aren't.
Closing Thought
If you've ever felt confused, frustrated, or demoralized by interviews, you're not imagining it. The mismatch is real.
The goal isn't to pretend it doesn't exist.
The goal is to understand it well enough that it no longer controls you.