Ask HN: I'm desperate. How can I overcome anxiety in interview situations?
I've had a decade long career, with the latter half at some decently big name tech companies. I code, I ship, the features I've worked on and led development on are now in the hands of millions of users. Unfortunately I was recently laid off, not due to performance issues. My whole team was deleted, and I understand the motivations for it, it is what it is.
Over the years, I've had an uncomfortably high interview failure rate despite my successes. I've only had success because my resume looks great; when I ship I do it well.
But I succeeded in getting my last job because I passed one out of 7 interviews. The more I talk to my peers as I've moved up in the tech world I've learned they do not have similarly high failure rates. They often have competing offers.
I am comfortable when secure in my job. Comfortable timing myself in Leetcode. My brain connects the dots. I take steps and decide which steps to take from there. Easy, because I can build the model/graph in my head, I am maintaining useful state.
But when I have to be face-to-face with someone who is judging me, who is determining my salary, etc, and I fall apart. I can barely contain my physical discomfort. Super obvious basic problems become complete mysteries, as my brain empties out all useful state, and I'm therefore unable to make connections without repeating the problem or concern multiple times. And because of this I'm very very slow. So slow that it is common feedback from interviewers, something that indicates to them I'm not senior enough.
The only common detail about all my successful interviews that was that the interviewer was super kind and I was able to maintain some confidence in my actions.
I also end up making the most absurd mistakes. Typing-variable-declarations-wrong level problems, and I'm utterly confused when they happen. It's as if I'm in fight-or-flight mode and I'm just making decisions, to make any progress at all, to get to the end of the stressful interview, but I make those decisions before I'm conscious of them, so it's a self-defeating loop.
I've watched my laid off teammates get positions at Google/Meta/etc, and I know I can't pass those interviews (I bombed the Meta coding sessions a few years ago). My anxiety is worse than ever now, as I am solidly without a job. I feel confident I can go work for a bank and be anonymous, there's plenty of jobs out there. But I want to be at the Big Names, and part of that is passing these types of interviews.
How have others resolved the particular problem of performance anxiety, being graded, etc? What steps have you taken, where have you succeeded, etc.