> "They look like a great fit for the team and our goals, and let's give them a chance to learn the tech"
I wish more were like you.
I've definitely had my fair share of interviews that bombed so I feel like I have a good bearing of when I don't leave a good impression, but it's always the worst feeling to have an interview that you think went well based on the overall mood/feeling, only to receive the eventual rejection later in the day that they went with someone more senior or that they wanted someone with more experience in x.
My mentor who didn't got to a well-known college once told me he joined a very solid company not knowing anything about the frontend framework they used but they gave him documentation and let him learn it for weeks without touching the code base. He said it was honestly one of the strongest engineering teams he's worked on in his career. The idea of managers seeing potential in someone and thinking "let's go with that person who has never done x" seems so foreign to me.
Re: your last paragraph, I feel like that's symptomatic of a change in the relationship between capital and labor that has happened to some extent at every level of the market.
Companies are increasingly unwilling to invest in the wellbeing or value of individual workers, instead treating workers as fungible assets to minimize the cost of which serve as solutions to current (rather than long-term) problems. We see this with the near-universal embracement of short-staffing in service-level jobs, lack of career mobility from starting positions, and even in the tech industry with the expectation that you usually have to switch companies to get a raise.
I wish more were like you.
I've definitely had my fair share of interviews that bombed so I feel like I have a good bearing of when I don't leave a good impression, but it's always the worst feeling to have an interview that you think went well based on the overall mood/feeling, only to receive the eventual rejection later in the day that they went with someone more senior or that they wanted someone with more experience in x.
My mentor who didn't got to a well-known college once told me he joined a very solid company not knowing anything about the frontend framework they used but they gave him documentation and let him learn it for weeks without touching the code base. He said it was honestly one of the strongest engineering teams he's worked on in his career. The idea of managers seeing potential in someone and thinking "let's go with that person who has never done x" seems so foreign to me.