I look back at myself and the kind of cringe responses (and questions!) I had earlier in my career and for the most part the interviewers were right to reject me but not necessarily on the basis of technical merit (or lack thereof). On a lot of teams being able to communicate effectively and develop a strong rapport quickly is a bigger factor for an individual's effectiveness than how much quality code and designs can be produced. Ironically, this is an even bigger requirement for smaller organizations. For example, see a pathological case a start-up of two people where they must both be _very_ good at working together or the entire company will fall apart quite quickly. Also in a lot of interviews I was unable to demonstrate that I'm competent partly because I had already burned way out from months of being on-call and losing a great deal of sleep, so I was walking into interviews at basically my worst possible performance. It took me quitting for a while, working on my own terms, and recovering slowly to be able to demonstrate what everyone saw when I was actually operating at my general level of competence in various dimensions. Additionally, got some professional help and with some clinical diagnoses under my belt with solid medications everything got substantially better after that. Going through basically an entire career with severe handicaps has made everything seem much, much easier to handle.

It's ironic that the dynamics of targeting higher quality candidates are not that different from personal dating. While for larger organizations they seem to stress how much more damage a bad hire can be they have the capacity to absorb losses better than substantially smaller organizations on a purely mathematical basis. Likewise, individuals that have higher resources, emotional intelligence, capacity for grace, etc. can much better tolerate "bad" relationships yet are among the most stringent at avoiding "bad" relationships in the first place.