[lordnacho]

It seems to me like that best predictor of whether you'll get the thumbs up is social cues, rather than anything technical.

I went to an on-site at a major company, and there was a guy who just wouldn't smile. He also led me down the wrong way on the tech part, which is easy when you make zero facial gestures and talk like a robot. I figured it out eventually, it wasn't hard, but he dinged me.

With the other people it was just a breeze. We chatted about various low level performance things, about how the work environment is, and so on. The tech parts were easy, because you could tell whether you'd actually understood the problem correctly.

[will_pseudonym]

Yup! Also, would you really want to work with person A? I wouldn't, no matter how talented. Our scarcity mindset as employees has us asking for any job sometimes, no matter how awful the fit...