I’ve been job searching for quite a while now, and I’ve been giving some interviews every now and then. Yesterday, I had one that went absolutely nuts, I absolutely lost my shit, couldn’t answer anything properly, and felt ultra bad for 15 minutes straight after that call.
But, a day into thinking and drinking (water), I think I kinda know what I gotta do to move past this, to make this not be a stamp of failure on my braincells, to feeling good about myself without giving up accountability.
Soon as that call ended, my first instinct was
Fuck that guy, piece of shit was asking me all these Leetcode hards as if he can solve them himself, learn how to conduct an interview bro.
Okay, chill out dude, take some deep breaths like those YouTubers say, calm down. After about 15 minutes of shifting all blame on the interviewer and not taking any accountability whatsoever, my rational side slightly came back to life, and I could see that it was my fault, all of it.
So, naturally, I opened my little notebook (trying to write on paper again instead of iCloud notes, cuz iCloud notes suck) and wrote down whatever I remembered, including the coding problems I was asked. I gave myself a score of 4/10 in my notebook, 6/10 if it’s a good day, but I’d def botched the 4 technical problems.
Naturally, I gave Claude all 4 problems and asked it to solve them (AI is def not coming for my job), I’ve fine tuned my Claude to butcher the shit out of my self-esteem, unlike ChatGPT, and that’s what it did. Insulted, humiliated, absolutely dogged by a Chatbot, I realized that even 4/10 was a little optimistic.
I’ve given some instructions to Claude to not take my feelings into consideration, to be 100% rational, and to point out each and every flaw in my prompts without any sugarcoating, and that’s one way to not fall in love with your Chatbot like the weirdos at r/MyBoyfriendIsAI.
Turns out, I had butchered every single coding problem I was given, even the one I was sure I passed. Kinda wanted to delete Claude at first, but then I remembered it was me who wanted it to be straightforward with me, not the other way around.
Regardless, my disappointment was immeasureable and my day was ruined. I wanted to run away and scream or some shit, primarily because I had been job searching for about a month now, and this felt like a genuine chance, this was the 2nd interview at the company and the first one went so well that I was genuinely optimistic.
The actual score was 2/10 btw, 2 out of 10 of my answers were correct.
Since childhood, since 1st grade, I’ve received the same exact comment from my teachers: Brilliant but overconfident.
I have an overconfidence problem, might even have ADHD or some shit but don’t know yet (judging from how stupid my time senses are). Either I know everything about a subject or I don’t, in my mind at least. I have to constantly self-regulate and remind myself that I am not perfect, that overconfidence is my one true problem.
Joining that call, I felt ready, I knew I’d kill it since I’d killed it so many times before. I felt that way, but I also knew that overconfidence is my problem, so 10 minutes before the interview I went through some of the key/popular questions/problems for the job/role, and crammed them all into my cranium.
This is a role that I’ve spent years mastering and working in, surely I know all about it, especially the fundamentals, how can I not know something, me, not knowing the fundamentals? Nah, never happened. Truly never happened, my fundamentals were always pretty strong.
I go in, answer a question super brilliantly, and then the second question is:
What is event delegation in JavaScript?
I know event bubbling, I know event propagation, I know event handling, I’m pretty sure I’ve heard the term event delegation but I’ve never really learnt what it is, probably because I’ve never really got to use it. Kind of a downside of being a self-taught learn-by-doing engineer, you don’t know shit about shit you haven’t used.
In my college days, I’d walk into the examination hall unprepared, see a question I did not know the answer of but could understand the English, would write a whole essay down about whatever the question was saying, and pass, it worked, it would work here too, right? Right?!
No, I don’t do that in interviews since it wastes time. I give a clear answer that I don’t know the answer to this but would love to learn about it especially from the interviewer.
This is where I kinda blame the interviewer, but not too much, he could have at least told me what it is instead of just saying “skill issue” (he didn’t actually say that but chose not to tell me what the answer is).
Although I take full accountability of the mega-botch that I did, I blame the interviewer for 2 things:
Searching the syntax should be a no-brainer, but I wasn’t allowed to do so. Using AI should also be a no-brainer since you can actually test an engineer’s code review skills by asking them questions about the AI-generated code, but that was banned too.
After going through the 6 stages of post-interview-grief, I decided to not let it get to my head. I’m still me, my experience is still there, one bad interview doesn’t negate all the work I’ve done for all the amazing companies, it only enforces the idea that I need to stop being overconfident.
I gave Claude all 10 questions I was asked, and asked it to find me about 30 more, placed them all into a post and went to work. The goal was to answer all of them correctly and publish the answers, and Claude was the examiner, and I was allowed to search the syntax, learn, and use AI.
And so I went to work, I didn’t know the answer to most things, super contrasting to what I thought of myself. I thought I knew all the fundamentals of JavaScript, and this was a proof that I was delusional all this time, sure I knew my shit, but turns out there’s a whole shit-verse I’d never explored.
Truth is that an interview doesn’t mean shit if you got 9 more lined up (I don’t). As long as you don’t repeat your mistakes by learning from them, you should not feel bad about yourself. I have a mantra that I go by:
I have yet to come across a problem I haven’t solved.
And it’s true. Every single problem I’ve faced, no matter how impossible it may seem at the time, eventually got cracked and got solved. Unless you’re repeating your mistakes, you’re good. And if you’re repeating them, make sure to double check if you got ADHD or some shit.
Jokes aside though, if you truly haven’t learned anything from your mistakes and continue to repeat them, you need to stop whatever you’re doing and give it a good thought. What is it exactly that’s preventing you from learning a lesson or two from your mistakes?
This was fun to write, and yesterday was a fun day (pun for sure intended).
Maybe the real success was the interviewers we pissed along the way.
Sayonara, cowboy (I hope that means Goodbye or some shit).
Send me an email or message me on LinkedIn if you're looking for someone who builds without BS.