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Comment by jschoe | Hacker News Reader

In the YouTube comments he stated nonetheless that he still bombed big tech interviews, specifically the technical portion, probably because of some ridiculous LeetCode problem he did not memorize beforehand. It just goes to show how these procedures do not effectively determine who is actually a good engineer or programmer. If this guy can't land a job while achieving this, then something is not quite right with the interview process.

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hi! yep! this definitely happened. I do mention it in the next "why" video, but it's good feedback to know this is interesting to people because I could say a bit more about what those rejections were like - specifically the one where I failed the technical screening.

I'm actually really excited to share that part of the story because I hope it can be a small thing in the back of people's mind to help them if it happens to them. It can happen to anyone. Interviews are SUCH a lossy process and most engineers I know don't have any training on how to do interviews at all - yet we just assume they know how to evaluate people's skillsets.

What you've accomplished demonstrates a very important skill you have, persistence. Kudos and don't give up.

About those rejections, did they effect your confidence in yourself and your skills? How did they make you feel?

I was crushed and embarrassed. Yep. Not even gonna lie.

I used to work on Insomnia at Kong, which is literally a frontend for cURL. But some of the questions I couldn't answer were like "how do you get headers with cURL". I DON'T FRIGGIN KNOW. THAT'S WHY I WORKED ON A GUI FOR CURL. I CAN'T STAND USING THE CLI. lol. But to them, it was a question they were supposed to ask, and I got it wrong. Same story for questions about the git CLI DX (I'm a GitKraken fanatic lol), and more like that.

I would rate my confidence overall as being quite low. Well. I donno how to explain what I'm trying to say. It's not that it's low or high, it's that I don't factor it in a lot in what I decide to do. Where I've noticed some people dip their toe in, I find it easy to just cannon-ball into the frozen lake without needing a lot of justification. That's what I meant in the video about "close-enough-manship". I'm a sort of personality that spends a lot of time just failing miserably over and over again in the least efficient way possible until I get what I'm looking for - and I usually quickly move on before I learn what I could have done better, lol. I've been told that my comfort in the face of non-stop-failures is what confidence is, but I donno if that sounds right.

Getting a job these days is really tough on the psyche.

You have coding skills. Some marketing and video production skills. Self discipline and persistence. The time to spend 18hr days on a project. Why look for employment? Start your own business.

are you some kind of fortune teller!? haha. so that's so funny you say that because that, too, is a big part of the story. actually I was gearing up to do exactly that - but everything blew up in my face and this Doom project was, in many ways, my way of picking up the pieces from the rubble.

there's another reason, which is that I really get a lot of energy from working with other people. it makes me really happy. and right now especially I really love the people I work with. I learned this lesson the hard way in my stint contracting - because the inter-personal relationships are very different when you're there one day and gone the next (as a contractor).

Those interviews select for the type of person that believe it is worthwhile to dump tons of time into studying minutia to succeed at those types of interviews.

The purpose of a system is what it does, after all.

You're making an excellent case for using AI during the interview. If you can actually code and do the work, you're hurting no one by using tools to get past these arbitrary barriers during the live interview. The system is clearly flawed when someone demonstrably skilled gets rejected over trivia.

I actually created a tool to help myself get through the live interviews, specifically by listening to the questions and giving me real time answers to things I couldn't recall under that kind of pressure. It's not about not knowing the material, it's about the ridiculous expectation to perform perfectly on demand.

OTOH he points out that he learnt an enormous amount during this project specifically, so probably much more employable now.

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