Usually 3-4. It's tough to line them up, so the ordering is not always complete, but I do get a couple of "doesn't matter" interviews done before I go for a "meaningful" one. Sorry for wasting your time, companies that don't matter. You wrote the rules, I merely play the game.
Thanks, I dont interview much and now that I'm looking I realize it really hurts me. I'd love to know if its best to apply for do a few jobs a year or dozens. I haven't seen many stats on this, you just see people getting new roles without saying how many times they got rejected.
If you are otherwise competent, as you progress through your career, you will realize that most of the time (if not _all_ of the time) you get rejections not because there's something wrong with you, but because _their_ interview process failed. You know what you know. They don't. If they failed to ask you about things you know - that's their loss. I know it's hard to view it like that after a rejection, but believe me, you'll agree with me on this over time.
I don't want to doxx myself, but more than once I have been rejected by companies that were looking to do X, while I was demonstrably one of the world's foremost experts on X. Once I was rejected because I didn't know a tiny detail about CPU cache coherence protocols, for example. Something that I learned on my way back to my car in the parking lot. Makes zero sense to reject people with deep domain expertise over the trivia questions like that.
Another thing you'll see is that not every rejection is a downside. When we look forward to something we tend to paint an overly idealized picture in our minds for how it's going to be. But it rarely turns out quite like that, and you sometimes find out much later how much of a bullet you've dodged, thanks to a rejection you were super bummed about at the time. It's just work. It doesn't matter _that_ much.
