The whole process is a roll of the dice. The more senior the role, the less fair that roll of the dice will be. If you can accept this fact, you don't have to be "trapped". That's how I think of it anyway: I never spend more than 2 weeks (_very_ part time) preparing. I do get rejected sometimes, but I get plenty of good offers too.
I've been in a ton of debriefs at this point. I no longer feel bad about any rejection I've had from any big company. "Dice roll" is a perfect way to describe it. The number of things that someone will raise an arbitrary red flag over is endless and largely down to personal bias / mood of the interviewer.
I've seen people discredited for not setting up some large inheritance hierarchy for their whiteboard design question. What's "Doing it Right" for one person (me: avoid inheritance like the plague), is someone else's "this guy couldn't code his way out of a paper bag".
As one of my university professors said before exams: "I know which parts you don't know." Meaning that if he wanted someone to fail, he could easily arrange that. This was his way of motivating students to attend the lectures.
There's really no way to prepare for the full set of eventualities, and unless you do something spectacular (chances of which are slim in a high-stress situation), their opinion of you is formed in the first few minutes of the interview anyway.
Yeah, I agree.. Doing enough prep to get a hundred percent acceptance rate is not worth it. And it is a level I couldn't achieve anyhow. I've done fine on my career with 50 percent or lower acceptance rate at interviews. It's one of the things I'm the worst at in this industry, but you only need to change jobs fairly infrequently.
I also question a lot of these "I landed every offer" claims. People often exaggerate their victories.
It's easier to land offers for entry level positions. "Landed every offer" probably means entry level. Companies are hungry for decent devs who don't yet know their real market value.
