ok so my roommate goes "just install the desktop app" and i go yeah sure. did not install it. three weeks go by lol. 9:50 am the morning of the interview i click the webex link feeling responsible for once. page says desktop app or browser. browser obviously, who installs random cisco stuff right before an interview. WRONG. browser asks my name then a spinner appears.
9:58. 9:59. still spinning. 10:00 and it has not stopped. panicked, refreshed, downloaded the desktop app, finally joined at 10:04 looking like someone who forgot they had an interview. thinkpad fan going full blender because i had turned on a virtual background which was so dumb, cold pad thai from last night on the counter, roommate texting me "is your laptop dying." yeah it kind of was.
my roommate had told me the browser join is broken half the time btw. he interviews on every platform because he applies to everything. he sent me a screenshot of his webex app installed and ready the morning of my interview, no caption, just the screenshot. i did not respond to it. he keeps a running tally of the told-you-so's and last count was double digits, that is basically our entire friendship.
next day, second round happened somehow, i did his stupid test call. virtual backgrounds on webex. toggled one on. fan went from zero to jet engine in four seconds flat. toggled it off. silence. five dollar curtain from target, hung it behind my chair. done forever. webex also buries the audio device selection in some settings submenu and picks whatever it wants.
during round one it picked my laptop speakers as BOTH mic and output so the interviewer heard herself echoing back at her. she goes "can you.. fix that?" and i fumbled through menus on camera for thirty seconds. thirty seconds of someone watching you click random buttons while you pretend you know where the setting is. not an exaggeration when i say it felt like thirty minutes.
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Try InterviewMan Freeback to friday night though. my roommate and me, his apartment, two beers in. round two coming up and every interview tool we tried that week choked on webex. five or six chrome extensions that all worked fine on zoom, every single one choked on webex. cisco locked screen capture down tight on that thing. my roommate hosted a call, i shared my screen with an extension running.
"i can see it." tried another. "i can see that one too." he kept repeating it with zero emotion, total bad news delivery lol. webex has two sharing modes that work completely differently, share an app window and it only broadcasts that window, share full screen and it grabs everything visible, but the extensions showed up in both modes because they lived inside the browser tab itself. dead on arrival.
we built InterviewMan as a desktop overlay, not a browser extension. my roommate hosted a webex call, i shared my application window with our overlay going, and he saw nothing. tried full screen sharing. still nothing. then my roommate goes "wait hold on" and pulls up the recording because he records everything, scrubs frame by frame, that is just him being him. nothing in the recording either. twelve bucks a month.
ok ethernet. he yanked his cable out mid call to see what would happen and webex dropped me right away, video frozen, audio garbage. zoom is fine with a half second blip. webex just dies on you. plugged my own ethernet in, fixed. then he goes "look at your display name." i had no idea what he meant. "ibrahims macbook." webex pulled it from my system settings during the actual interview and i never noticed. that is what had been showing in big text the whole first round.
other things from that night. the reaction button. i hit thumbs up by accident, took me seven seconds to find the unclick, yellow emoji over my face the whole time, roommate cackling. noise removal on my thinkpad turned my mic into a broken walkie talkie so off it went. his macbook handled the same setting fine, useful information for me, the thinkpad guy.
he yanked his ethernet again as a stress test and webex let him back in on the same link with no admit step. webex got that one right.
oh and. before any of friday he had been on LockedIn AI for like four months, fifty five a month, used it on a webex PM interview that ran 105 minutes because the panel piled on a bonus round. ninety minutes in the overlay died on him. fifteen more minutes of interview to do with nothing. he got the offer because he is annoying like that but he was done with session caps after.
round two. finance company. curtain up. ethernet in. display name fixed. our overlay running. she asked about a transaction processing pipeline and the architecture pieces were on my screen before i had finished parsing the question. talked through the design and looked at the overlay any time my brain blanked, which it does pretty fast when somebody is watching me on camera.
follow ups came rapid fire after that. failure modes, scaling angle, monitoring story. the overlay had been pulling from things i said earlier in the call so my follow up answers connected back to my original design instead of me drifting into something different.
got an offer email two weeks after. one forty four a year, twelve a month on the annual.
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