[hahahaha23]

don't get attached to this type of things. sometimes they reject people, because certain team doesn't have budget anymore, i.e. not your fault. sometimes, this is just pure luck. tech interview is kinda broken. I know capable people being rejected by google, I also know incompetent people got accepted by google and Facebook. As an example, my friend got to know a fellow engineer during google's orientation. That engineer told my friend that he/she heard that google usually won't fire engineers due to performance issues. So he/she had decided to fool around. that's how fucked up the interview process is. people with passion and real experiences get filtered out. people who prepare the interviews as exams get accepted.

the right strategy is applying for many companies all at once. overlap your preparation effort. don't just try and count on one company.

[some_rando]

Thanks, I appreciate the encouragement. I'm actually fairly happy with my current position, where I'm one of the more senior engineers. I was contacted by Google (and Facebook within a few days of each other, the latter of which I have an interview with soon...). So I'm not really in "job search mode," much less obsessed with working at Google, but nevertheless I can't help but feel a sense of wounded pride. Even more so due to the fact that I interviewed with Google 2 years ago and had the same result, but that time I didn't study at all and this time I did, and thought that I had done a lot better. :\ It also doesn't help that Google said they were "aggressively hiring", which apparently still doesn't mean that "answering all of the questions" is good enough.