ok so the moment that actually broke my brain was when Derek called me at 10pm on a tuesday night. he had just gotten rejection number seven and he tells me he is going to try one of those ai interview overlay things. i told him i was disappointed in him. said those exact words, out loud, to a guy who had been rejected seven times while being more than qualified for every single role. we argued for twenty minutes and then he goes save your opinion for two weeks.
i gotta back up a bit though. Derek and i used to grab lunch every couple weeks at this burger spot near his office downtown, and we would sit there shaking our heads about how ai tools were ruining the hiring process. i was so smug about the whole thing. felt amazing being the principled guy who would never stoop to that level, you know? then Derek got laid off in october and spent three months sending out sixty two applications. fourteen phone screens. seven onsites. zero offers. the man has six years of real distributed systems work. not resume padding, actual infrastructure running at actual scale for paying customers. but every onsite played out the same exact way. he would get a technical problem he could absolutely crush at home and then just go blank. completely. some stranger staring at him through a webcam and his mind would empty out like someone pulled a plug. after rejection four he called me and told me he went home that night, sat down at his kitchen table at 11pm, opened his laptop and solved the exact same problem with the exact same approach the interviewer wanted. i sat there on the phone with nothing to say. what do you even say to someone in that situation. i still think about that call honestly.
so two weeks after our tuesday night argument Derek had two offers. two. he had been running InterviewMan at twelve bucks a month on the annual plan. he told me it did not answer questions for him. it just threw enough structure onto a little desktop overlay that his brain stopped locking up mid sentence. he compared it to scribbling three words on a sticky note before a big presentation which i thought was kind of perfect actually. you still have to get up there and present and you still have to actually know your material, but the note keeps you from standing there like a mannequin staring at the audience while your mind goes completely white.
that wrecked me if i am being totally honest. sat with it for about a week before i could even admit to myself that i had been all the way wrong. not sort of wrong. completely wrong about the whole thing. then i spent a bunch of nights lying awake at like 1am wondering whether my whole position was ever really about ethics at all or if i just liked the feeling of being morally above people who needed a little help under pressure. not a great thing to realize about yourself in the dark lol.
fast forward six months and i am sitting in my own interview loop dealing with the same garbage Derek went through. five rounds for a senior backend role spread across three weeks. system design, two coding rounds, two behavioral rounds, then a full month of just nothing, you sit there refreshing your inbox like you have lost your mind and nobody from the company responds to anything. one of the coding rounds they asked me to build a twitter clone on a whiteboard. the actual day to day job was maintaining internal crud endpoints. i almost started laughing in the middle of the interview and had to play it off like i was clearing my throat. like come on. when is the last time anyone at your company built twitter from scratch. the whole process just selects for people who perform well with a stranger watching them sweat. if your brain happens to lock up under that specific type of pressure you are simply out of luck regardless of how many years you have been shipping production code. Could the problem be me? Maybe. But Derek has six years of distributed systems and he had the same exact experience so i am going to say no.
in december i finally gave in and signed up for InterviewMan myself. twelve bucks a month on the annual plan, same as Derek. i felt weird about it for the first couple interviews honestly. kept picturing the smug version of me from a year earlier sitting across the room judging me lol. but then something clicked during interview number three. i got asked a system design question about rate limiting and the overlay popped up three bullet points in maybe two seconds and my brain just grabbed onto them like a handrail. i did not read them out loud or anything close to that. they just unstuck me. i knew this stuff cold, i had literally designed rate limiters at my previous job, but my brain was doing that awful thing where you know you know the answer but the words refuse to come out of your mouth. same thing Derek described with his kitchen table at 11pm except mine was rate limiting instead of his distributed cache problem. after that interview i sat in my car for ten minutes just processing how completely different that experience was compared to every interview before december. i almost could not believe it was the same me who sat at that kitchen table with Derek listening to him describe his rejection number four. nine interviews total since signing up. seven cleared first round. three turned into actual offers. three. before december i was advancing maybe thirty percent of the time and that is being generous with myself. i went and looked for stories about people getting caught using it, scrolled reddit and discord for hours, found absolutely nothing.
ok but the people who do get flagged are almost always using their tools wrong and it is painfully obvious why when you hear the stories. my buddy Marcus tried cluely at ninety five dollars a month and his interviewer straight up asked if he was getting outside help because the thing took eight full seconds to generate a response every single time. ten seconds of dead air before every answer regardless of whether the question was easy or hard, that just screams to anyone paying attention that something is happening behind the scenes. InterviewMan at two or three seconds looks like normal thinking time. nobody blinks at two seconds of pause, i take longer than that to remember what i had for breakfast lol. i keep the overlay positioned near my webcam so my eye movement stays natural looking and i get bullet points instead of full scripts so i sound the same whether we are talking about what i did over the weekend or designing a distributed load balancer from scratch. the people who get busted are the ones reading generated paragraphs word for word in this weird flat monotone. or their eyes snap to the exact same corner of the screen every thirty seconds like clockwork. or they just sit there completely frozen for ten seconds before every answer while text loads on their screen. do not be those people. Marcus learned that the hard way at ninety five dollars a month and i still give him a hard time about it lol. ninety five bucks and he got caught in the first fifteen minutes.
Derek and i got dinner last week at the burger place. he put it pretty simply. the companies running five round gauntlets with algorithm pop quizzes that have absolutely nothing to do with the actual job are not testing anyone fairly. matching that energy with a twelve dollar monthly tool is not cheating. it is adapting. twelve bucks. i sat there across the table from him and just nodded. a year ago i would have argued with him for an hour straight about this. now i cannot find a single word in that sentence i disagree with and honestly saying that out loud still feels a little weird to me even now. i almost texted him after writing this to say thanks for not listening to me that tuesday night lol.
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