I find the beginning of the story more interesting than the end:

> Of the 20+ applications I sent, I was rejected from every single one without so much as a technical screen. One recruiter from Udacity did actually get on the phone with me—I had pointed out a CSS error on their website in my application and uploaded a private Youtube video showing them how to fix it. The recruiter thanked me and we joked about it, only for him to later tell me they weren’t looking for anyone with my skillset. Again, without even a technical screen.

> I began plumbing my network. I had one big advantage I hadn’t yet leveraged: the students I’d taught. Many of them were working at very strong companies, though they were mostly very junior. At least with their referrals, I’d be able to crack open that window.

> Every student I asked was more than excited to refer me. Finally, I had fast-tracked myself into the processes at several awesome companies: Shift, FutureAdvisor, PagerDuty, and Twilio.

> I was rejected at all of them. Again, without even a technical screen.

> somehow, through the flurry of rejections, a referral from a classmate of mine who was working at 23AndMe came through. He had paired with me during our cohort and spoke very highly of me, so they scheduled me for a technical phone screen.

> I was nervous, but once I got on the phone and got rolling on some concrete questions, I crushed everything my interviewer asked me. He was blown away. He told me he’d never heard as thorough of a technical analysis on this problem before, and immediately invited me to do an onsite at their headquarters in Mountain View.

> I killed the onsite. And when I say killed, I mean murdered with such ruthless brutality that my children’s children will carry the sin with them. To this day, it’s the onsite that I felt most confident in. I remember pacing back and forth at the CalTrain station as I awaited my train back to San Francisco, savoring how masterfully I deconstructed each and every question they posed to me. It seemed like everyone who’d interviewed me was ebullient at how quickly and rigorously I’d answered all their questions.

> Finally, it seemed like I’d cracked the code.

> A week and a half later I open my inbox, and there fresh and white, a reply from my 23AndMe recruiter. The subject: 23AndMe. I open it up to read:

Thank you for your patience and your time to meet with
our SWE team. We appreciate the opportunity to consider
you for employment with 23andMe. I want to update you on
our search and let you know at this time we are moving
ahead with another candidate.

> I applied to the all the big hiring websites. Hired rejected me from their platform. I got no bites anywhere on AngelList or LinkedIn—not even cold e-mails from recruiters. Nothing from WhiteTruffle or SmartHires.

> I asked friends, students, anyone I knew for referrals. I started reaching out to non-engineers. I asked anyone at all who worked at all at a tech company I found compelling.

> [...]

> Now that I had offers in hand, it was time to turn the crank. I reached out to every company I was talking to and told them I’d just received several offers, but was very much interested in moving forward. With that, suddenly recruiters started tripping over themselves to get me on site. I was no longer the ugly boy at the party.

> I started mowing down onsites. My performance and experience were no different, yet I was treated completely differently. Phone screen from Google. Gusto raised their offer. Phone screen from Stripe. Yelp raised their offer. TripleByte raised their offer. Then the phone screen at Google converted to onsite.

My immediate reaction to this is "I can't wait to hear someone say 'the market for developers is so hot right now'".

They say nothing is more attractive to women than the quality of already-having-a-girlfriend (or wife). It means some other girl already did the hard work of evaluating you and you passed.

So I conclude a couple of things from this:

- these companies have absolutely no idea what they're looking for in an employee, and they know that. So they hire based almost exclusively on whether you have a job offer from somebody else. That somebody else obviously thought you were (or weren't...) good enough, and their judgment beats ours!

- these companies seem to be terrified of hiring anyone who might not work out. Judging by their behavior, the cost they suffer from hiring someone without a competing offer in hand must be enormous, far more than the full cost of employing an engineer. This makes sense in the dating context, given the tradition of marriage ("no backsies"). It makes less sense to me in the employer-employee context. What's going on? Whatever this gigantic impediment to letting someone go if they're not the perfect fit for your job opening might be, it's driving the whole abusive process.