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Comment by baron816 | Hacker News Reader

I went through a bootcamp at the end of 2014, then spent the next three years unable to get a job in tech. I didn’t have a paycheck for those three years.

Triplebyte was my last ditch effort. I failed the online test the first time I took it, came back and then failed their interview. Came back again, got five in person interviews in the Bay Area. Didn’t get offers on the first four (one place even kicked me out halfway through the set of interviews). But I managed to get an offer from the last company, which I then spent the next four years at.

Had I not gone through Triplebyte, I probably would’ve given up on working in tech. Instead, I’m an L5 at Google.

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> one place even kicked me out halfway through the set of interviews

It might feel better if you realise they "let you go home" rather than "kicked you out". If a candidate is clearly not qualified why waste their time (or ours) going through interviews that we already know won't lead to a hire?

BTW we always consider this a failure of our process (phone screen in particular), not failure of the candidate. We should never have brought them in in the first place.

That's still an amazing level of persistence.

What motivated you to push through so much failure?

Overconfidence. I had built some cool stuff, but I didn’t know much I didn’t know. So having interviews where I wouldn’t get any feedback left me in the dark about how far off I was.

I’ve always had sterling reviews as long as I’ve been in a job. I’ll leave it to you to wonder how much of that is competence and how much is successfully pretending to be competent.

> I’ll leave it to you to wonder how much of that is competence and how much is successfully pretending to be competent.

It still sets a baseline level of competence, even if it’s not quite as amazing as it appears.

People always think I’m competent, but it’s really me just starting on ‘what I expect people to be doing in half a year’ now, so by the time they start doing it I’ve already gone through all the pitfalls while they weren’t looking.

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