[csnewb]

That's hilarious and so true. Last year I interviewed for a senior back-end engineering position at a well known mid-sized company in the Bay Area. They put me through 2 technical phone screens and a 6 hour onsite interview, grilling me in detail about system design, domain knowledge, personal experience, and of course doing endless exercises of writing solutions to algorithmic problems on a whiteboard. I really felt like I nailed the interview but they still rejected me because they thought my technical skills weren't good enough. 7 months later I start applying to jobs again via LinkedIn, and guess what, that exact same position on the same team is still open. It seems insane that during the past 7 months they couldn't find a single person to fill that role. Makes me wonder if they know what they're really looking for.

[Vekz]

There's a whole metagame of HR metrics within companies. KPI's are set to interview X amount of candidates or extend Y offers. Arbitrary hiring is a common goal after a fundraise. Not every HR team sets thoughtful efficient goals or gets reviewed for waste. This can lead to perpetual interview pipelines and fake work to keep the Hiring team employed. This is equivalent to software engineers building knowledge moats for job security.

[fma]

It's also possible someone quit. LinkedIn has/had a feature where you can find people who used to work at company X. I interviewed somewhere and got an offer. The work was up my alley, and the interview was a difficult but fair interview. But it felt it was a bit too "fast-paced" for my taste. I used that LinkedIn feature and saw most engineers stayed about a year there.

I declined the offer.

[matthewowen]

"senior engineer for team y" is a position that's constantly been hired for at most growth companies. The fact that they're still hiring for it probably doesn't mean much.

[digianarchist]

Exactly. We are hiring constantly for several positions: junior, senior, lead. We don’t want to saturate job boards so we artificially limit listings.

[draw_down]

Respectfully, I don’t think you can really determine much from the outside, there are just too many things that happen. Maybe they hired someone and then they ran into visa issues, maybe someone switched to a different team, the possibilities are endless.

One thing I will say is that for many employers, a "no" now doesn't mean a "no" forever.