Get mock interviews now, pay when you find your next job

I think you mean this as a minor criticism, but this seems to be exactly the point of the service. To figure out a way to find people that are actually competent at the work itself, but not in the somewhat uncorrelated skill of public speaking & live coding w/ an audience.

Also a good way of identifying people that haven't gone to top tier elite schools but are just as good or better as those graduates: Recruiters at a FAANG might disregard a graduate from Generic State University w/ 2-3 years of experience under normal conditions, but if you get one that is willing to place a $1024 bet on themselves and then passes the tech interview with flying colors, it's a much easier sell.

Now, with all that said, after 6 years I'd still really like to know what their long-term outcomes are. What's their typical tenure at that job, where do they land for $job +1, +2, etc.?

e: I wanted to add that my mentor and I decided that we would do 4 pure teaching sessions, and then the remainder would be partial mock interviews that would transition over sessions from them doing most of the talking to me doing most of the talking. I found this format to be good for building my own confidence.

I did about session a day for maybe two or three weeks. I'll compare it to trying to practice by doing real interviews. I got much more detailed and honest feedback from my practice interviews than any real one I've had. I got to practice just the interview type I wanted, algorithms, without doing other things that would come up in a series of interviews (culture, system design, etc). I also didn't have to contact and coordinate with >= 10 companies to get 10 sessions. I just booked 10 sessions.

They're not desperate... they're doing this because they 1) get paid and 2) enjoy helping people get better at this stuff.

Happy to set you up with an account so you can get a feel for the quality.

What do you mean by that?

Sure you it can become easy if you "Practice" but everything gets easier the more you do it.

People who pass these either have have IQ or have grit, thats why companies use this to judge canidates, either you spent 500 hours on learning it or DS/A just sticks to your head like glue.

This can be ameliorated slightly if the interviewer is willing to accept a hypothetical, but this has rarely been the case for me recently.

For you. I am a bit over a year into my eng career and coding interviews are far harder than any other type of interview for me. I have a handful of stock behavioral question answers that I can adjust for most non technical interviews. I do minimal prep before hand looking up who I am interviewing with to have a few questions for them and try to find a way to relate to them during the interview.

That is much easier than someone asking me anything from fizz buzz to red black trees.

One of my favorite job offers was literally a conversation that played out like: Manager: Cool, come to our office and meet the team Me: Want me to prep for a tech challenge or something? Manager: Nah, you were employed by ____ for __ years -- if you were incompetent, they would have fired you years ago.

If the company you're interviewing for is among the highest paying companies in the world, where you can literally change the quality of your life and your family's life by making enough money to comfortably retire as a multimillionaire by the time you're 35-40... then investing months doing the dreaded leetcode grind, mock interviews, and doing everything in your power to prepare for it is absolutely worth it.

In fact, seeing just how few people are willing to actually invest time and effort into excelling at an interview process that can tangibly improve ones life in ways very few other professional careers can is even more of a reason to do it. Every time I see people who are dismissive of technical questions, rant about how it's unfair that interviewers expect them to understand fundamental data structures, algorithms, time complexity, and think that all they should need to know to be a developer is how to glue a few APIs together, it makes me both sad to see how low of a standard we hold ourselves to, but also in a selfish way it makes me happy knowing that the competition for competent developers is so low.

Because if you need a job, the wild asymmetry between you and the interviewers.

You have to be ON for that short time and ready to deal with questions like what you got about "best vacation" or in the next question code a red-green tree implementation, followed seconds later by describing a full scale cloud architecture.

All of that in an hour.

And if you falter anywhere along the line, they reject you and you worry about how you will feed and clothe yourself and your family.

I had a career in recruiting before moving into eng and I loved interviewing. I'd bullshit with the interviewer, we'd talk about shared interests, and we'd talk about recruiting techniques for a little while. I passed the vast majority of interviews with absolutely minimal prep.

I'm a year into an eng career and I've already failed more technical interviews than I failed in my entire recruiting career.

Apples to oranges.

And if you find a job through us, you don't have to pay for practice.

1. Messgae people on LinkedIn, the more senior in the company, the better. This was by far the fastest and most reliable way for me to get to the first round.

2. Message the company via a recruiting@, or contact@, even a support@ email they have on their website. Not as reliable as option 1 but better than the job application forms.

3. Have them contact you via a "HN who is hiring?" post, it's rare, but it does happen.

If it's a job post form, then personally I'd just consider it a loss. Don't know why, it's not like I provide different or less info compared to direct messaging, but that just leaves me ignored for weeks, or rejected with a template message.