I dread the next one.
> But I scheduled so many interviews I didn't have time to dwell
If you are sensitive to failure, a trick to overcoming it is to overwhelm your ability to dwell through sheer volume of experiences. Usually the anticipation of the next experience makes dwelling on the last one difficult to impossible. This works for dating, interviewing, presenting, and probably myriad other things that I haven't had to get better at.
Does this make it so your body thrums with cortisol nearly 24/7? Yes! But do you improve quickly? Also yes! How long do you want to spend getting better? There's both a time cost and emotional cost to improving slowly. Conversely, improving quickly is exciting and motivating.
I went through period where I was not only bad at interviewing, but so nervous that I couldn't control my palms sweating so profusely that it was embarrassing to shake hands with my interviewer (and probably gross for them!). Once I realized I had to go for volume to get over my nerves, things changed dramatically for the better.
Try it!
I launched a popular open source software that turned into a company.
The lesson I learned is that you shouldn't draw too many conclusions from just a few bad interviews.
My current position was basically just a conversation for an hour. Best interview ever... Went in thinking I was gonna have to do the whiteboard thing and they never asked me one question about any kind of algorithm. Been on the team several years now and it's the best position I've ever had.
I'd probably need something like a 50 to 75% salary bump to consider leaving, and I would flat out refuse any whiteboard interviews. I always count myself blessed that I'm in the position where I can be selective. If I was desperate, I'd have to compete for them like everyone else.
Some employers are stupid and make bad decisions because they’re too shy to ask for a third round of interview when we assume everyone at that level will know the standard set of JS skills, especially since the market is difficult for employers. While it’s painful to give them the time to evaluate you properly, it may also save you from a bad employer.
So you can’t “just quit”.
Probation shortens that notice period to typically 1 week however most people tend to leave straight away as it’s fruitless to both parties if the employee stays.
It's not an equal risk though - the employer can easily weather (or not even notice) the ending of that employment, while the employee undergoes a life-changing event.
> the employer can easily weather
In a large business maybe, but more often than not in a large business you're a number and you're gonna pass probation regardless.
In a smaller business, the cost of recruitment process can be huge, it's not just 1 hour interview and you're done as an employer. It's hours of reviewing CVs, contacting people, arranging times, conducting interviews, weening people out, disruption to your primary job role, etc etc. That's a huge cost and drain on the business.
If the business decides they don't want you during that probation period, you must have done something pretty bad, because that's a huge cost sink to that business.
In a medium business alot of that goes away, sure, but they pay for in recruitment fees, interviews (less) offers, onboarding, etc.
My point is, its very difficult for a business to weather this stuff. If a business lets you go during a probation period, it must really not be a good fit.
I've been involved in some recruitment process over my 18 year career, never the primary person doing it, so only reviewed CVs and been in the interviews.
Only once did we let someone go during probation, because he was quite toxic and spent all his time complaining rather than working.
At the same time I've only seen 1 person quit during probation after 1 week. He was hired to do Design and HTML/CSS, but decided after 1 week he didn't like doing HTML/CSS and decided to leave. Which made my boss absolutely furious because of the wasted time that the typical 1 week notice was thrown out the window and he was asked to leave the building right away.
Not as life-changing to the business as it is to the employee.
> At the same time I've only seen 1 person quit during probation after 1 week. He was hired to do Design and HTML/CSS, but decided after 1 week he didn't like doing HTML/CSS and decided to leave. Which made my boss absolutely furious because of the wasted time that the typical 1 week notice was thrown out the window and he was asked to leave the building right away.
And yet, that did not cause the business to pay the current employees less, or downstaff, did it?
After all, if the financial implication did not involve cutting costs down just to survive, then it is not comparable to an individual, who literally has to spend less money and cut out existing costs just to survive.
> After all, if the financial implication did not involve cutting costs down just to survive, then it is not comparable to an individual, who literally has to spend less money and cut out existing costs just to survive.
I’m not sure you understand. It still costs the company.
It was the employees decision to leave because he decided he didn’t want to do the work he was hired to do.
Should the company say “oh no problem we will just pay you because we have some money in the bank right at this very moment in time”?
I'm not contending that, I'm saying that for the employee it is a matter of survival. For the company, it's not.
> Should the company say “oh no problem we will just pay you because we have some money in the bank right at this very moment in time”?
Where in " the employer can easily weather (or not even notice) the ending of that employment, while the employee undergoes a life-changing event. " did you read that?
I said that it's not an equal risk; the individual stands to lose a lot more by losing their job than the company stands to lose by losing the individual.
To the company, the risk to the individual doesn't matter. To the individual, the risk to the company is irrelevant.
IOW, when someone leaves their stable employment and starts with a new company, the company's risk (lose some money) is almost insignificant compared to the individual's risk (starve).
Hence I said that the risk isn't equally shared between the parties. In comparison to literally dying, the company's risk looks almost negligible.
For those rare candidates that completed the problem rapidly, we would give them a follow-on question that was a more typical interview question, just so that they didn't think our bar was set stupidly low.