Comment by roland35 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by roland35 | Hacker News Reader

I don't mean to be harsh, but as an engineer you owe it to yourself to try and get better at interviewing. Does it suck? Yeah absolutely. Is it an annoying process? Definitely. But even if you have an easy and stable job things can change quickly at any company. You're only closing doors on yourself.

If you get nervous, the main thing you can do is more interviews. My personal anxiety peaks right before the start time, luckily my bathroom is next door to my office! But after doing dozens of interviews I settle in once it gets rolling.

If you hate leetcode, well just get good at it. Yeah it is kinda dumb but it is straightforward to practice. And there is a lot more to a leetcode interview than knowing tricks - you need to communicate well.

Take homes? Yeah they are time consuming. If you really need a job do them, otherwise pass on the company!

Overall as a candidate you really need to try and go one level up on selling yourself - not just why you are a great candidate (which you are of course!), but why you would succeed at this role in particular.

It's hard to get better when you don't get feedback

Self reflection amend critique are skills too.

I'm happy to provide feedback for anyone reading this - Mock interviews or code challenge reviews. No guarantee it's helpful but I'm not a black hole at least!

Not a huge AI guy but this is something LLMs can do quite well (less so before gpt-5 because that model was a sycophant) but I learned a lot about personality interviews by simply having the AI throw questions at me and then taking my answers apart.

Yeah companies generally won't provide feedback, there is no benefit to them and many times candidates will just argue about it anyways.

For better feedback there are some good mock interview companies out there, or you can ask a friend or mentor. I've also had really good luck just talking to Gemini/Chat GPT.

I'm getting pretty old and have done a ton of interviews at this point in life.

There's never been a single one that went poorly and I didn't know exactly why without a word of feedback from the company I was interviewing with.

Poorly is different then hitting 90% (maybe?) of the way there but still rejected. Or conflicting responses from different interviews. Like you did great on the coding then the next company thinks you did poorly.

I disagree. I know when I get questions right, or can't do them. In my experience, either I screwed up a question and legit didn't get the job, or I was fine and the interview process is just a bit random. Sometimes it's the interviewer's fault for asking bad questions. Most commonly it's: "how do you light a fire?" "with a match" "but you don't have any matches" "a lighter" "no lighter either" "flint" "no flint" "stick and bow" "all the wood around you is wet" "I give up" "you use a magnifying glass of course!"

You can actually ask for feedback and usually they'll give it. In the EU they have to tell you what they wrote about you in their internal system under GDPR (or at least my company's lawyers believed that)!

The one time I got really great feedback unprompted from a hiring guy it was basically "they were disappointed you didn't know X" and I was like "weird, I do know X!". Very interesting to see it from the other side but I don't think it was very actionable.

I would probably adjust my original post to say you cant better without useful feedback.

I always ask for feedback after an interview, its almost always useless. And conflicting between company interviews.

Its pretty rare for me to totally bomb an interview to the point i don't know the question. Usually the situation is I answered the coding question, handled the follow ups, wrote working code and still get the feedback that the coding portion didn't go well. How do you use that feedback? Useless imo.

I’ve only been able to book two “phoned-in” (literally and figuratively) interviews in the past year. Not enough to get comfortable.

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