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Comment by gregjor | Hacker News Reader

Ironic to give this advice with so many people on HN and elsewhere bitter about companies ghosting them after interviews. I wonder how employers might adapt their recruitment processes if practice interviews become a thing.

Not saying it’s a bad idea but it does seem a little bad faith.

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This is kind of why I haven't replied directly to this one yet. I don't know how I feel, ethically, about wasting interviewers time. I've been on the hiring side of the table a ton in the last 13 years (just not on the other side of the table) and I'm not sureI'd be trilled if I found out candidates were doing this to me.

With that said, ethics aside, it does seem like a solid way to get practice.

I suppose you've fundraised at some point in the past 13 years. If you have, the advice you probably received was to start with the tier 3 VCs, hone your pitch, and move on to the VCs you really wanted to work with once you had your pitch nailed.

The same principle applies here. The more interviews you do, the more comfortable you'll get, the better it'll go. And who knows, it might work out with one of the first companies you interview at!

That sounds like a good idea but oddly enough the first startup (the one I was at 10 years) only raised a friend and family and we were able to land customers and bootstrap from that and the second one I bootstrapped out of a little cash I got from the first one so no investors to go to per say.

Thanks for the advice, though!

> if practice interviews become a thing

They've always been a thing; at least in SV.

No, not always. I have worked in the software business too long to buy the “always” line. Even if true that doesn’t make it OK to waste the time of multiple people who go through an interview in good faith.

People who need to practice tech interviews, while probably optimizing for the wrong thing, have plenty of resources available to do that.

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