I did, across different roles in two well known teams. As I said, there are exceptions, and the hiring bar has been dropping a lot in the recent years.
In all large companies the people involved in an interview are a tiny fraction of the whole workforce.
Most of the time it's people from the team that is hiring and one or two "guests" from other teams (but usually working in the same building).
Managers also have plenty of power to influence the decision, therefore keeping a very uniform hiring bar is really difficult. (But no, it's not "completely arbitrary")
Also, I wrote that the bar dropped a lot, to the point of shifting all employees level up by one, but this does not mean that the company hires 90% of the candidates.
If a team was hiring 1 candidate every 1000 screened resumes and now it's 1 in 100 it's a whopping 10x change... but that doesn't make you a terrible engineer!
Sorry, I was just trying to comment on how interviewing itself is an arbitrary crapshoot.
Say one slightly dubious thing and you torpedo your chances of the job. Write one slightly dubious thing on your CV, and it will be rejected without a second look.
While I’m confident that most of the people rejected for those reasons would be at least adequate at their job.
Lets face it hiring is just a shambles in this industry. 20 years in the industry I know how to write a reliable system that is easy to maintain. Getting kind of crap at the tests they give in interviews.
