What actually separates people who break into competitive tech roles from those who stall out at the application stage? Trying to think through this more carefully because the gap between "qualified on paper" and "actually getting interviews" seems way larger than it should be for a lot of people, and the explanations I keep seeing don't fully account for it. The standard advice is: LeetCode, good resume, network, apply to a lot of places. That's all fine. But there's clearly something else going on because plenty of people do all of that and still hit a wall, while others with comparable or weaker technical backgrounds seem to get traction faster. The delta isn't always obvious from the outside. A few things worth pulling apart here. Is resume filtering actually happening on content, or is it more about formatting and signal density in a way that has nothing to do with actual skill?…