And also I’ve long ago dissociated my tech interview performance with my actual performance indicated by performance reviews.
While there is an element of survivor bias to my story, people always underestimate the role of stamina and willingness to grind when no one else would. It is a very long game but so is life. I was never looking for the easiest way, and in hindsight I think that produced more satisfying results even if the path had much lower lows.
A few thoughts from seeing this play out around me:
Interviews are insanely volatile. You can be the same exact engineer on two different days and get completely opposite outcomes, just based on the question draw or the interviewer’s style.
Brand name helps but doesn’t guarantee anything. A big tech logo on the resume gets you callbacks, but it doesn’t magically make you good at the modern interview format. You still have to perform in the moment.
The hedonic treadmill is real. Once you get into a top company, it’s wild how quickly “this is amazing” turns into “I can probably do better.” It tricks you into thinking you’re always one jump away from a better life.
Leaving a stable spot is always a gamble. People romanticize the jump to a startup but never talk about the reset it causes when things don’t go perfectly.
Failing interviews after success hits harder than failing before success. Before, you can blame lack of experience. After, you have to confront the randomness of the whole system.
Your point about regrets is also spot on. Not every action is worth taking. Sometimes staying put is the smartest strategic move even if it feels boring.
Something that helped me personally was learning how to control the chaos during interviews. Most people actually know enough to pass, but nerves kill them or they blank at the wrong moment. I ended up using a tool during interviews that gives me hints and guard rails so I don’t freeze up under pressure. It’s called StealthCoder and it just overlays explanations on my screen quietly. It doesn’t fix skill gaps but it stops those panic moments that cost you the round. It’s allowed because it just runs locally like any overlay and doesn’t interact with their systems.
But yeah, your story is a good reminder that careers hinge on timing, mindset and a bit of luck. Stability is underrated and chasing “more” has real risk attached. A lot of people only learn that the hard way.
This is account is spamming - as in advertising on HN. This software is definitely not "allowed" during any typical leetcode interview. The website is very explicit and upfront about this being cheating.
They're also posting during the middle of the day in the country where the company making this product is headquartered, and it's 4AM in the country where the vast majority of HN users are.
>Don’t get me wrong—having “the name” on my resume now meant I could get at least one chance at an interview about anywhere
Never mind, it's been written or at least edited by ChatGPT.
I’m sorry but this is patently false. Apple devices have been autocorrecting two hyphens into a em dash since as long as I can remember and I personally used them all the time before LLMs were a thing and absolutely saw them online. I try not to use them now because people will annoyingly call me out for using ChatGPT when I’m not.
I think Apple devices also default to “smart quotes” if I understand what you mean by that. For example I’m typing this on my iPhone and I get this quote character automatically when I tap the double quote button on the default keyboard: “
If I want straight quotes I have to long press the quote button and explicitly select it: "
I think on macOS it’s the opposite for quotes, but macOS will absolutely autocorrect double hyphens to em dashes.
> I don't understand how you're all not seeing how many posts on HN now are AI.
There’s a also a big difference between using AI to reformat/clean up your text, especially for non-native English speakers and a bot just spamming LLM replies, but none of your “gotchas” can discern the difference…
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16582136
There is on instance, an obvious copy-paste. Now go to any from the current top list. I count 10+ per submission, even on submissions with much lower post counts that the Stephen Hawking one.
But I'm not going around policing em-dashes or smart quotes and calling people out for using them. It's more like when someone gets a bingo in ChatGPT phrasing and style idiosyncrasies then it becomes suspicious and I'd hate to think I'm here talking to bots (I've already left many subreddits because for AI slop).
I've seen highly rated posts on HN that might as well have started with "You're absolutely right!"
Personally, I apologize for unfounded accusations. I think it would suit you to do the same, now that you’ve acknowledged it.
What did you hope to achieve with the accusation?
If you feel a comment is disruptive or off-topic, just downvote it IMO.
I'm struggling to see why you think I acknowledged that my accusation was unfounded when I explained exactly why I think it's valid. It's clearly AI and I would bet my life on that post having been at least edited by ChatGPT.
>What did you hope to achieve with the accusation?
Plenty of online spaces are now full of bots posting and replying to other bots with the occasional human engagement. Some subreddits I used to post on are practically useless now with all the AI spam. Dead internet theory etc. If I wanted to talk to a bot I would use AI directly without pretending I'm discussing something with humans.
You literally wrote “yeah okay it’s an unfounded accusation”.
I hope you can see why I thought that was an acknowledgement?
Sure I don’t want bots any more than you do, but I also don’t think it changes anything to blindly accuse anyone you think sounds like an LLM.. I mean, bots don’t self-destruct if you call them out or anything.
Engaging with bots likely just amplifies the problem (by causing them to respond), rather than just downvoting their posts.
Do you start reading sentences from the middle?
At an earlier point in my life, I had been applying to many well-known big tech companies right out of school (not a top school either). I never got a reply from any of them so I ended up accepting a local job with a non-tech company after months of searching.
But I didn’t give up my hopes and kept applying to big tech, and while I did manage to get the occasional interview with some mediocre companies or the random startup, I also miserably failed all of them too.
At some point during my long period of despair at never getting a better job, my very top pick (and arguably one of the best tech companies in the world at the time) reached out to me. Even more miraculously, I somehow passed their interview (the only tech interview I passed in the prior year) and accepted a job there.
I really enjoyed working there. Some of the best years of my life. And my performance reviews were great too, so the imposter syndrome from having failed so many tech job interviews sort of faded into the background. But after a while, perhaps due to the “hedonic treadmill” mentality, I thought I could do better. So I left to join a startup.
Well, the startup failed, as startups tend to do, but what I didn’t expect and what caught me off guard was that I was now back in the same situation I was in right after graduating from college. Don’t get me wrong—having “the name” on my resume now meant I could get at least one chance at an interview about anywhere. But much like the first round that I tried to forget about, I once again failed all the interviews.
Unfortunately, this second time around never procured a “get out of jail free” card.
So I guess my lesson is: 1) there’s a lot of luck involved in these things, 2) if life gives you a winning lottery ticket at some point, don’t throw it away for the chance to win an even bigger lottery, and 3) that famous saying about “the only actions regretted are those not taken” is absolutely, totally wrong—almost all of my regrets in life relate to taking some action I shouldn’t have rather than inaction.