Bullshit rarely passes technical interviews at places with low turnover.

I've done some cloud stuff on AWS and GCP and thought I knew enough to pass interviews, then they started asking me about stuff I hadn't even heard of anywhere I'd worked.

Started a new job 3 months ago, 80% of our stack/frameworks are technologies I've never heard of before. Tekton, Firestore, Cypress, 42Crunch, Conformance, Cloud Functions (I think that's just GCP Lambda), some front end testing frameworks I don't know (more of a backend guy though I know raw JavaScript/TypeScript, HTML, and CSS really well from back in the day), Hoppscotch instead of Postman for some reason... and other stuff I'm forgetting now.

I thought because I'd written applications that ran in a cloud environment and understood Jenkins, I was all set. Nope. 28 years I've been doing this and I still feel like a newbie outside of the Java web services ecosystem. And it doesn't matter how good I am in that arena because the code is shit almost beyond repair. Half of our tools are flat out being lied to. Our endpoints are written to detect our testing frameworks and just respond with 200 and a blank payload. Our Swagger is useless because everything returns Result so you can't see the DTOs because 42Crunch gives like 600+ errors because of how garbage the API is written...

Man, I drifted there. Point is, you need to know enough to get the job in order to bullshit your way into it.

My secret? I'm in a high turnover position in the Midwest market (not competing with the glut of tech workers in major hubs, nor drawing their kind of pay) and the technical interview was pretty laughable. Now I have to try to prove myself and get hired in as a full employee rather than contractor. Then I'll have some job security and maybe a path forward that isn't just keep taking Sr. Dev, Team Lead contracts.