kitchen counter. 11pm. cold pad thai leaking from the container onto a paper towel because Marcus and i own zero real plates. he does this thing with one eyebrow. does not say a word. just. the eyebrow. december and honestly i deserved worse than an eyebrow.
three months earlier that same kitchen. "dude you are going to get caught with that tab open." his exact words. three months i said nah.
SHARE YOUR FULL SCREEN.
fintech pair programming round. Zoom. December 14th, 2:30pm. ChatGPT tab just chilling in my browser. green logo right there in the toolbar. two seconds to close it. maybe less. then forty minutes of binary search after that, hands shaking so bad i kept typing semicolons instead of colons on my Das Keyboard 4 that cost sixty three bucks on eBay and has queso on it from two separate incidents. almost added vomit to that list. serious.
texted Marcus "ok you win" at midnight. eyebrow emoji back. lol.
ChatGPT costs nothing. i am cheap. math seemed fine for three months. math was not fine.
not trashing it for prep though. totally different thing.
Amazon loop night before, could not sleep. pasted the JD into ChatGPT around like 1am. ten likeliest behavioral questions for a senior backend role? forty five seconds flat. way better than reddit threads from 2024 where half the advice is outdated and the other half is people arguing about nothing. fed it my resume too and had it build STAR stories for "tell me about a time you disagreed with a technical decision" because my normal prep is this: blank google doc. 2am. staring at cursor. close laptop. bed. every single time lol it is pathetic honestly. system design prep also, RabbitMQ vs Kafka trade-offs and such, better than those 2023 blog posts i had bookmarked that were probably wrong by then. midnight, cant sleep, loop in two days, nobody watching? ChatGPT is great for that, really genuinely great, and everyone should use it for prep.
live calls though. nope. this is where i was an idiot for three months and i get mad at myself thinking about it still. ok so what actually happens, and i feel dumb even describing this because Marcus watched me do it and just shook his head, is you alt-tab out of Zoom, type the question while the interviewer is watching you look somewhere else, wait like three to eight seconds for the response. feels like thirty when someone is staring at you on webcam btw. then you try to read it without looking like you are reading, then attempt to say it back naturally. fifteen to twenty seconds minimum even if you type fast. i timed it during a mock once. twenty two seconds. twenty. two. and on a HackerRank screen where the interviewer can see your browser toolbar? the tab is just sitting right there you cannot hide it.
Marcus and i tested this one night on a mock Zoom call and he told me afterward it looked like i was reading from a teleprompter every thirty seconds. asked me if my wifi was going out lol. my best friend who knew exactly what i was doing and was specifically looking for it, he thought it was internet lag. any real interviewer would just think you are weird or distracted.
the mic thing is what finally broke me. ChatGPT straight up does not have one. cannot hear the interviewer talking at all. so you have to manually type every question. and during a fast technical back-and-forth where follow-ups come every fifteen seconds? you are still typing the first question while the interviewer is already on the fourth one. sat there in a mock watching my fingers try to keep up and just thought, what am i even doing right now. this is a study tool. not a live tool. i had been using a study tool like a live tool for months and nobody told me because nobody knew except Marcus who told me repeatedly and who i just ignored every time because i am stubborn.
so that midnight after the fintech disaster i called Marcus and he picked up on one ring which means he was waiting for this call lol. he told me about InterviewMan. it listens through your mic, two or three seconds after the interviewer finishes talking there is a suggestion on screen as an overlay. no typing. no tabbing. not pretending the internet is down. first mock with it i was honestly kind of mad at myself because the difference was SO obvious that i couldnt believe i had spent months doing it the worse way out of pure stubbornness. Marcus just sat there watching me react and did the eyebrow thing again, which at that point i had to laugh about because he had earned it, like he really had.
i tried a couple others too because i am the kind of person who has to compare everything before committing to anything, my girlfriend Priya hates this about me, last week i spent forty minutes comparing three brands of dish soap at Target and she almost left me in the store lol. Derek from work was in the same boat, job hunting too, sitting in the break room googling alternatives on his phone between standup and sprint review. Final Round AI was a hundred forty eight a month and measured four to five seconds on my end, which is ok but when someone is staring at you waiting for a response you can feel every one of those extra seconds. Cluely was twenty bucks base but Business Insider reported five to ten second lag and also their stealth is a separate seventy five dollar tier so you are really paying ninety five bucks a month for something slow where you pay extra just for invisibility. Interview Coder 2.0, two ninety nine a month, and i kept finding reddit threads about the answer overlays showing up during screen shares on newer macOS versions, which at two ninety nine you are basically paying to get caught lol.
the screen share thing still gets to me because i got so incredibly lucky with that fintech round. ChatGPT in a browser tab is visible during any screen share, doesnt matter if its Zoom or Teams or Meet, anyone who has used ChatGPT even once would spot the interface in half a second. when i first opened InterviewMan Marcus goes "try to find it, we are screen sharing right now." i opened Activity Monitor, checked the dock, replayed the recording. nothing anywhere. i was actively hunting for it and could not find a trace. fifty seven thousand people use the thing, 4.8 stars from two fifty seven reviews, and i specifically went through the negative ones looking for "got caught" or "showed up on screen" and there was nothing. meanwhile i had been using a tool that literally sits in my browser toolbar with a recognizable logo for anyone to see.
the money part used to be my main argument for sticking with ChatGPT. it is free and i am cheap, there i said it. but a "free" tool that costs you fifteen seconds of dead air per question and almost got me caught on a screen share is not actually free. it is not. not when you calculate what losing a job offer costs. InterviewMan is twelve bucks a month annual, thirty six total for a three month search. that is straight up less than most people spend at the coffee shop in a week and i am not exaggerating, Priya has pointed this out multiple times. Final Round would run two forty three for those same months, Cluely with stealth two twenty five, Interview Coder almost nine hundred and thats just coding rounds, you still need something else for behavioral and system design. the sixty three dollar keyboard i almost threw up on costs more than three months of InterviewMan. that comparison is what finally shut up the cheap part of my brain.
i spent nothing on ChatGPT for that fintech screen and almost lost everything over a browser tab. twelve bucks a month since switching and i have advanced in every process since. Derek switched too after i told him what happened at the fintech round, he texted me "bro same" which is the most Derek has ever said about anything lol. Marcus had been right the whole time and i blew three months being stubborn about it. for chatgpt for interview prep the night before, still my go-to, probably always will be. for the actual live call it is not the right tool and i learned that the hard way. Marcus if you are reading this: one eyebrow. i know.
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