I'll give it a shot. They're going to keep doing it because they keep getting away with it. You've tied this to (I'm assuming) your real identity, so that makes it a little more difficult to call them out because they can respond. But if you don't let us know, we can't know to avoid them. Even avoiding spending time getting to a final round, only to be asked to do this, would be helpful.
They got you to work for free. They probably didn't benefit directly unless you gave them new ideas they didn't know about before, but you still put the time in. It was work to you. And they obviously didn't respect it at all, much less take the time to read your resume. Maybe they weren't even interested in hiring you?
The only saving grace for that could be an exceptional position with great responsibility and great pay. But even if that's true, they flippantly sent you through interviews for that position, so they're likely a bad company from the inside. They only way they would face consequences is if they're named.
The most likely thing that happened is that the company was willing to hire this person even without the requisite experience if the interviews had gone well, but then someone else also applied and they were a better fit. That's a shitty result for the OP, but I'm not sure the alternative is any better. Should the company just not have given OP a shot at all, reducing their chance to get that job to 0%? That's not beneficial for OP, either.
That's mightily disrespectful and sounds a lot like 'shits and giggles'.
>They were looking for someone with a few years of experience working with a specific technology I had never used. But… they knew that from my resume.
Can you explain why they might have gone with the above excuse rather than "we found someone better" or "we won't be moving forward"?
True. Doesn't mean they're managing it properly.
>no company is going to waste the time and money to go through 3 interviews with a person
Again, assuming the company is carefully keeping track of this.
Sounds like an "ideal world" fantasy to me. Yes, the situation you describe is how things would ideally be. But they're clearly not. This happens, a lot more than many feel comfortable admitting.
I was asked to make a presentation for an interview last year. I did so happily. I was excited to get to tell the panel about something I was passionate about, and to go into deep technical detail on a project I'd put a lot of time into. Who wouldn't want to do this? Sure, it's stressful and it takes time, but it's also fun. You get to talk about yourself! That's everyone's favorite subject.
I also understand that any sane company is going to do its due diligence before making a bet on someone who just walked in off the street. A bad hire has huge downsides, from simply wasting time and money to setting a whole team back. You're literally saying to the company, "hi, we just met; give me a bucket of money and make me a dependency in your roadmap."
Problem with "work assignments" like this is that there is completely assymetric skin in the game on this. I don't know if you have sent this same task to 1000 other people or just 3.
If everyone who did the interview was being paid, you can at least assume that they are moderately serious about your chance of joining the company.
1. It's tough to fire people (in that, if you ask someone to move and it turns out they aren't a good fit, it's kind of a jerk move to then drop them like a hot potato).
2. Performance indicators are tough. How do you know someone is doing bad vs good?
3. Keeping on a bad hire (especially one you can't identify), is damaging as heck. Best case scenario they don't get much work done, worst case scenario they suck away the time of all your good hires through bad decisions.
So while I agree that interviewing sucks, I've come to terms with why it is so bad.
Basically, for every person that works at some company (say, Google), there is a least one set of employees (the anti-panel) that would reject that person in an interview.
http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/03/get-that-job-at-goog...
Filtering out obviously bad employees is really not an issue. It's the fact that you're asking a committee to do exactly what a committee does worst at: making a decision.
So every interview panel collectively decides that it's best to not make the decision (i.e. reject the candidate). It's the path of least consequence for the members of the panel. If it turns out the hire was bad, they don't look like a bunch of fools.
> it's highly likely that someone on the loop will be unimpressed with you, even if you are Alan Turing.
I fully believe this. The only reason you will ever get hired is because the company is desperate to fill a seat at that particular moment in time. It has zero to do with technical skills, social skills, or anything. It's 100% pure luck.
Almost every tech company is "hiring." These companies don't stop hiring. Hiring being the advertising of positions and the interviewing of candidates. But that does not mean those companies are hiring right now. Or even have positions available for those they are advertising. It's often a big bureaucratic ship that doesn't have the capability of even knowing what their needs are at any given time.
It's kind of wild. We are now putting people through an insane interview, and then also telling them we are going put them through probation. Choose one, at least that's what I would say.
The referrals are a mixed bag, and I think would create a bit of a revolving door where it's hard to enter the industry unless you have connections.
If I were to ever try a startup (I won't), my philosophy would be to hire easily and fire easily. Do my level best to interview fairly, and give people a chance. But if they don't work out, fire them quickly and give them a 2-3 month severance bonus.
Then I would remove most titles and pay in the top tier. I think at the beginning of hiring, it would probably have a high turnover, but as the company matures, if it survives it will be filled with a lot of happy engineers that won't want to leave.
Should have more people wanting to come into the office.
But we never made it a gauntlet. Presentation was for 15-20 minutes, on a technical and hopefully interesting subject of the candidate's choosing. It was also the first "real" interview slot, because the idea was always that by allowing the candidates to warm up on a topic they were familiar and comfortable with, they would be more relaxed afterwards. And of course we explained the reasoning to the candidate, upfront.
Sure enough - we have people who enjoy being exposed to new, interesting, technical things. If they learned something new, great. If they found the topic interesting enough to ask further questions thanks to their own curiosity, even better.
On the other hand, Spotify used to require an on-the-spot adlib presentation during their initial interview a decade ago. That was disturbing.
If you’re interviewing academics, people who work in open source, or people who have already gotten a presentation cleared to give a talk somewhere, that wouldn’t be an issue. Those might be people you want to select for, but you should be aware that’s what you’re doing.
I once went for an interview as a contractor and they scheduled 8 consecutive interviews in a row. Half never showed up, or asked the same lame questions. Also what they were looking for was actually different than what they had told me, so I flew to another city (they paid) for nothing. I didn't get (or want) the job.
Good thing too, a month later the entire division was shut down.
The only thing that wastes more time than interviews is hiring the wrong person. Many companies take interviewing seriously, my company meets before each interview to go over the candidate's resume and discuss what we each want to talk to the candidate about. Then we have a debrief after the interview. Anyone can veto a candidate for any reason and only candidates that get a majority vote to proceed move on to the next step. If everyone is lukewarm on the candidate, then he doesn't move to the next step.
Interviews don't guarantee that you'll hire the right person, but do help screen out the wrong people -- like bad personality fit, insufficient knowledge of what they claim to know, etc
Good thing too, a month later the entire division was shut down.
Perhaps your experience at a failing division was not typical at this company
A mentor of mine essentially said to me it's not personal, think of how much each of those engineers are making and how much it costs to interview you. If you didn't leave a great impression (and I fully admit that I wasn't on my game), it's cheaper to move on. A bad hire is very costly in terms of money/time/energy.
At the end of the day, there's other opportunities. Plus, there's nothing that says given more time improving oneself, one can't land the opportunity they were looking for.
Remind me of the time when a company flew me to their office for a remote position to interview with the team, and 4 out of the 6 sessions were held over zoom because the interviewers were working from home that day.
And then they ghosted me after telling me I was great.
Despite multiple resume reviews and two phone interviews (one of which was supposedly technical) I was the first person to pick up on this.
The company had paid for them to fly over from the east coast, too.
> looking for someone with a few years of experience working with a specific technology I had never used. But… they knew that from my resume. And from my first interview. And from my second interview. And when they told me that I needed to prep a talk.
Shouldn't the company have seen this deal breaker before the interview process started? Or at least after the first interview or two? Acknowledging that the author wasn't the right fit would have saved both the company and the candidate the time and effort of going through an interview process that the company should have known wouldn't yield an offer.
I'm not sure if this is common practice, but I've encountered something similar, going through multiple rounds of interviews over many hours only to have the recruiter tell me that "based on your resume, you don't have the skills we're looking for in a candidate for this position". Why waster my time, and yours, going through the interview process then?
I don't think any of these rationales are very satisfying, but here are some possibilities: 1) The company didn't know what it was looking for when it started the process and came to a different understanding of the job requirements as the candidate moved deeper in the process. 2) The company is covering up the real reason they didn't want to move forward and "lack of relevant skill" is an easy excuse. 3) The company's recruiting process is immature/messy/sloppy/ineffective and they literally missed the lack of required skills until the very end. 4) The position had to be filled and the company wanted to maintain a backup candidate in case their first choice didn't work out.
I'd love to hear from those with experience on the recruiting/hiring manager side to see whether any of these reasons ring true or if something else might be at play.
It's a complicated situation from both side. If you're the company, you have to anticipate that the other candidate might get another offer, or turn you down, or turn out to be a flop, so you want to interview other candidates at the same time to have a back-up plan. And that's a good thing for the article author too, because it gives them the chance to see if they're a fit for the job and could learn the required skills even if they don't have them now. And it's great if it works out... but shitty when it doesn't.
It's worth realizing that it's a losing situation for the company, too. It's not like they want to waste a bunch of time interviewing you for a job you're ultimately not going to be in any more than you want to waste time on it. But unfortunately "wasting a bunch of time interviewing" is just how job hunting/hiring works these days.
I think you're right on here, but I also think the benefits diminish the further a candidate goes in the process only to get turned down with an explanation that was known at the beginning. How many interviews does it take to come to that realization?
> It's not like they want to waste a bunch of time interviewing you for a job you're ultimately not going to be in any more than you want to waste time on it.
It seems like this should be true, and I hope it is, but I have worked for companies that seem to interview just for the sake of feeling or appearing to move forward in filling a position. Maybe the recruiter or hiring manager is incentivized in that way? Some action, even if it's in the wrong direction, is perceived as better than no action at all.
So I can easily see the tables being turned the other way -- a candidate that doesn't have all the skills, but failed to wow us, would lose out to a candidate that better matched the skill set we were looking for.
Prepare for interruptions. Manage your time wisely. Prepare perfectly and be perfect.
I'll never be able to reconcile this industry's complaints about engineer shortages with the way so many companies talk to us like we're shit on their shoes.
But, if I had agreed to do this (if it was a paid, professional task), I would find the setting out of expectations extremely useful and appreciate it.
I want to know what to expect, so I can prepare for it, i.e. spend less time preparing for the unknown elements.
My gf has a PhD in $FIELD. She always has to give a 'job talk' for every job (since I've known her that's been all of FAANG plus some non-early-stage startups -- so most of the gamut). The talk isn't that different from the post doc job talk or faculty job talk, except the content is a bit more industry focused. Of course this is a function of the kinds of jobs she looks for. Every time she's decided to change jobs she worked on her job talk first (as Jessime had done for her talks as well). And to have the audience be more than just the engineering side is consistent with that. So the hiring team may have just assumed this was a "job talk" position, and assumed that the candidate would already have it ready to go.
Clearly the company was quite wrong, and that lead to an unreasonable burden on the candidate. It's a good reason to avoid the company: if they can't get the first impression right, well, perhaps the first impression is actually accurate as to how everything else in the company is run.
Again, I'm not trying to defend this unknown company in the slightest, just trying to imagine how this kind of thing could happen. Sounds like Jessime dodged a bullet, job-wise.
I gave job talks at ~85% of my interviews after grad school, and those talks were usually adapted from my PhD defense. I did make some changes: add in more background, emphasize parts of the project that are more similar to the job, etc. However, this certainly wasn't weeks of work; more like 1-2 evenings to edit the slides, plus a few run-thrus to practice.
It's possible that the presentation was not meant to be a burden at all. I've done similar interview presentations in the past, and it only took me 2-3 hours to prepare for it because my job experience is in a field where giving hour-long presentations with only a day's notice is commonplace. 2-3 hours preparation is annoying, but it's about what I expect to spend preparing for any interview. If OP was interviewing for a Solutions Engineer or Consultant role, for example, then asking for a 1 hour presentation isn't that unreasonable and it's likely that the company would expect OP to be able to prepare for that without it being a burden.
OTOH, if it was for a software engineer role and they were requiring a presentation even though it has nothing to do with the job function, then yea that's absurd. But which is it? I can't tell from the OP.
Given the kind of talk she described it sounds like a big miscommunication. It's possible the miscommunication was about the role itself. In any case IMHO the responsibility lies with the company.
This isn't high school, and you're not going to give me homework just for the chance to work for you. And I use the homework analogy intentionally, because just like with school, this doesn't scale. I can't interview at, say, 10+ companies all of whom are expecting me to put in paying-employee-level work just for the interview while also holding down my regular job. And I'm not going to go with a significantly shortened list of candidate companies just because their interview process is so onerous that I literally don't have the time to talk to more.
Again, I know not everyone can do this, but realize that companies try to exploit you during the interview phase, too. You need to also have standards for what you're willing to put up with.
I was lucky to get laid off and having time to find work without interviews last time I was looking for work.
Also I have small children and zero time for stuff right now.
How do you get the candidate to clearly show they have the broad knowledge and creativity required to be a good developer? What kinds of whiteboard coding problems do you usually give?
After my fifth interview I decided to take a break. It was a good experience for me; I was incredibly rusty during my first few interviews, but gained a lot of confidence by my last one. Overall though it was incredibly stressful. This authors experience sounded terrible, but not at all surprising. I think job hunting while out of work would be stressful for other reasons, but being able to commit your full attention to searching and preparing would be advantageous in my opinion.
Either way, I have major respect for anyone looking for a new job right now. I wish you the best of luck, and I empathize with how exhausting it can be.
Hiring is a two-way hard problem. On the company's side, they have conflicting interests where they want to hire someone as quickly and cheaply (cheap as in not spending hundreds of man hours interviewing just to fill a role), but also want to do due diligence so that they hire the right person. On the candidate's side, they also have conflicting interests where they just want a job and don't want to spend multiple entire days doing interviews, but they also need to do their due diligence to make sure the job is actually something they want.
This almost necessitates spending a decent chunk of time with each other, but not too much. The balance that most big tech company's seem to go with is 6-7 hours total in interviews for each candidate (and then ~10+ additional hours for both the candidate and the company doing preparation/debriefs). I really don't know why or how this was the number arrived at, though. From my perspective as a candidate, even after 6-7 hours of interviews I often come away still knowing very little about what the job actually is. And from my perspective as an interviewer, I know that requiring so much time from internal employees serving as interviewers is draining and stressful. It seems like it ultimately comes out to a lose-lose, but for some reason it's still what big tech sticks with.
Broadly, I feel like we need to work to get better at most processes that involve humans. Managers need to get better at setting expectations, giving feedback, appreciating people's work, etc, etc. Employees need to improve their communication skills, reliability at forecasting, etc, etc. HR needs to make sure employees feel comfortable, welcomed, valued etc. Leaders need to better convey a vision for the company, etc. Basically everyone needs to improve in whatever job function they're responsible for. Hiring is no different - its just one of the many functions of a company.
People love to base arguments in data, but in what cases will data/models lie to you? If a company has been around for a while, has no obvious problems keeping their employees, does that mean that another company can simply adopt their model and be successful? Specifically, should we expect that companies which measure identically on key metrics (employee churn/turnover rate, employee work/life balance perception, employee retention, etc) are also similarly great at hiring?
The interviewer asked me to bring in a laptop with some code I could discuss. I did, we discussed. He asked me some questions, I added a simple feature at his request. No time wasted on my part (ok, I was in a position that I had code I could bring in). It was code I knew, so no gotcha or anything fancy. Relaxed, friendly, the interviewer learned something rather than trying to one up me.
Like I say the only downside I can see to this approach is that people may not have a side project that they can share easily. In which case they will have to do the equivalent work of a normal technical test. So the worst case scenario using this method is the same as the standard scenario.
I’m working on a tiny piece of the broken hiring process, Job Descriptions. Many of them (esp non technical role) are essentially illegible and absolute garbage.
Hopefully it reduces the wasted time upfront by improving the quality of matching between job postings and job seekers
If a company sees no issue with asking for a TED talk just to consider you for a position, imagine what kind of work/life balance you can expect once hired. What kind of last minute assignments, what kind of weekend calls to wipe some higher up's rear end after they foot-mouthed with a client, and promised the moon, and now you've gotta go to Kroger and find 40 tons of cheese and carve it up so they don't need to look stupid.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: we as software devs/code monkeys/devops/admins have fucking worth. You should not EVER be willing to put yourself through this kind of meat grinder, not just to avoid demeaning yourself, but for demeaning everyone else who practices your craft alongside you. They're not worth so little as to need to do that, and neither are you.
You want me to write code for your company? Awesome, I'd love to do that. Pay me.
If this became standard practice interviewees would create a presentation once and then adapt it for each company. So sure, you'd put in a dozen hours or so the first time but then for future presentations it would take much less time to tweak it for the intended audience.
Personally, I wouldn't do either one. I'm fine with multi-stage interviews, even multiple drives to a given location, but there are limits. If a company wants me there for an all-day affair, I better have some compensation on the way, either the job itself or just for the time investment. I'm too damn busy to just flush a day down the toilet on a "maybe we'll hire you," not even going into the travel expenses, arranging time off from my current job, etc.
All my career I have watched as stories from fellow tech workers get more and more ridiculous, the lengths they're expected to go to for a freaking interview. It's gotten disgusting. If a company thinks you're a good fit for their position, they should be ready to court you as well. The only context these death march assembly line interviews make sense in, is if you are utterly meaningless to them, just another cog to be placed, and eventually, replaced. And I don't want to work for anyone like that anyway.
Overall the presentation portion was a decent experience. I presented for 10-15 minutes and the folks in the room asked questions for about that long.
I didn't get an offer because of "concerns around culture & team fit." I'm pretty sure that wasn't a result of my presentation, but, rather, that I indicated I didn't care much for death marches (and they were clearly on one at the time).
Had I put 10 hours into the presentation like Op I would have been annoyed. But an hour wasn't bad. Altogether, I think it's not a bad way to facilitate conversation and allow a broader group of folks to participate.
I totally expected to see complaints about DS+A style questions, some discussion about how leetcode is useless for actual job performance etc. When people who make those complaints are pressed for alternative interview styles, a common response is to suggest a presentation very similar to the one described in the OP.
I’m somewhat skeptical that this style of interviewing is any better than the standard leetcode method, but I’m interested in hearing if there people who have the opposite view. Would anyone prefer an hour long presentation over an hour long algo heavy white boarding session?
OTOH, if it's for a position like a consultant or solutions engineer, which are positions where you are likely going to be giving PowerPoint presentations and training sessions to customers, then I think such a presentation during an interview is actually very useful, even though I personally hate doing them.
His interview would be better than a DS&A interview except there is a presentation to an audience instead of a 1-on-1 conversation. This would make sense for a sales or upper-management position, but not a line SWE position. The reason for rejection is also suspect as that should have been caught in resume reviews. My guess is that he wasn't picked for whatever reason and they gave him a general rejection. Either way, I would much rather my career rest on my actual work experience than my ability to solve DS&A trivia on a clock.
And I shall say that I am on a 1920x1200 screen. If the interviewer was watching on a corporate laptop this might be 2 pixels per letter.
We should record job interviews.
Then both sides can review at their leisure.
Maybe then we can start improving.
--
Origin of Idea:
I ran for office. Lots of endorsement interviews. It's just as bad as you'd expect. Comparable to our industry's hazing rituals.
The better interviews were recorded. The best were shown on TV, available online.
Somehow everyone's better behaved when there's witnesses. (I quickly learned to make and release my own recordings of endorsement interviews.)
--
We should practice interviewing. Just like public speaking, stump speeches, etc.
Ages ago, I worked at a place that took recruiting and interviewing seriously. We had agendas, checklists, scripts, surveys. We practiced on each other, switching roles. We did all hand's debrief after each candidate.
We treated our interviews as seriously as our usability labs.
Though we mocked the term at the time, I miss "learning organizations". When some of us at least tried to get better.
Okay, rant over.
I was wrong. After another all-day onsite (this time I had the foresight to bring some snacks because, again, there was no break for lunch although I spent quite a bit of time sitting by myself waiting for interviewers to show up), I never heard back from them again.
Maybe fixing the technical interview process starts with the highly qualified candidates decisively saying no to these things. I understand that not everyone is in a position to do this, but those who are should just say no and maybe it will help fix things (the takehome assignment fad and other brokenness).
At the end of the day you never know what you're getting from an interview, some great candidates turn into duds and vice versa. It's amazing how many people in hiring positions are just really shit at judging character, instead they rely on some bullshit metrics and process to fill in their lack of intuition.
The last one I went through 3-4 hours worth of remote interviews.
In the first interview I made it clear I'm in no rush to move, I get payed well, they contacted me, i'm only listening as looking for new interesting work. They where a bit fuzzy about the role/salary saying they are looking for smart people then decide the role for the person etc etc so I said in order not to waste both our time this is my current salary, I'll happily move for that if it sounds interesting, not interested in less, can't afford to live on less.
I get to the end of the interviews, recruiter: so where do you want to start negotiation on your salary, then announces a value 30% less than what I am now. After me replying "you want me to take a 30% pay cut, a substantial risk moving job with no reward from the risk and leaving me worse off, I can't accept that", I haven't heard back since.
The annoying part is I mentioned several times, if they want me to do more interviews I don't want to get to the end to find out salary range is not in the same ballpark as don't want to do remote skype calls after working all day for nothing. I was assured yes it's fine multiple times. The only thing I can think off is they thought I was bluffing on the salary so thought I'd go for the low ball.
My job search cycle is once every 2-4 years. Within each cycle, I've always found my later interviews go much smoother than the early ones, due to incremental preparations adding up to much smoother execution.
The first new interviews are always rough, after a long hiatus. I generally look at those as warm-up interviews...
So it's not necessarily a net-zero reward, for the story portrayed by the author.
After having done a lot of hiring interviews (100s) over the years, I can say that my own methodologies have improved substantially in terms of asking the right questions and being as objective as possible, but ultimately 1) members of my panel might not have that many experiences to hone their skills and 2) the data capture and evaluation process is a "clunky spreadsheet" exercise at best.
EDIT: The book "Who: The A Method for Hiring" is a great resource for this.
This type of expectation of free work during the process needs to change. Maybe if enough people reject stuff like this, it will, but again, many can't afford not to jump through all the hoops the company decides to put in place. It's a tricky problem, to say the least.
We all know very well that the company had a few other candidates in the pipeline that were more qualified, and they were simply covering their butt with a "less qualified but still maybe good candidate" while they were extending an offer to the candidate they really wanted in case they turned it down.
I would do the same thing as a job seeker. Interview with a company even though I'm waiting for an offer from a more desirable organization.
Motivation, drive, and enthusiasm, are important. Not doubting that.
But experience teaches that most companies use the notion of enthusiasm to mean you're going to work overtime, not get paid for said overtime, and generally get heaps and heaps of work loaded on to you, far more than reasonable, and if you complain, they'll "doubt your enthusiasm".
Not a workplace I want to be part of.
I read through the presentation, it was very interesting! But it seemed more about advertising and marketing than bioinformatics or programming. Was the job related to data acquisition and experiments?
The experienced engineers in the audience absolutely tore me and my code apart. It was a blood bath and semi-traumatizing.
On the upside, I took their criticisms seriously and came out a better engineer in the end.
After the first four years of holding up a smidge of hope that things would get better there, I decided to start applying elsewhere. I got quite a few responses from some well known organizations that I had wanted to work for. Passed their screener interviews, passed their technical assessments/take home projects, went through final interviews with a good number of them, only to get the email response of, "Thank you for interviewing with xyz. Unfortunately...". When following up for feedback, rarely were the responses substantial or in a couple cases, even believable.
Now, I totally understand that one will never pitch a perfect game, but man, when you go through 12 interviews at some solid places, where 7 of them seemed to go really well, and you left them thinking, "Man, I feel great after that. Pretty sure I aced it!", and even had the managers saying things like, "We think you're gonna be a great fit! Look forward to hearing from us in the next couple days", one would reasonably think they'd be receiving an offer soon after. Unfortunately, that was not the case for me, and after getting the last rejection response I called it quits. The emotional/mental toll of putting in so much time and effort into processes which in most cases looked to have favorable outcomes yet amounted to nothing, was just piling onto and worsening my existing state of feeling beaten down, and it wasn't worth furthering that.
Then came the layoff in October and I immediately began applying away. This time around I've been getting more responses than ever before during a job hunt, and once again with reputable organizations, again with many times making it through each step of their interview/testing process, again with having some great experiences and feeling confident about the outcomes, again with the overly positive/leading statements from managers, and again being let down each and every time.
The best was with a mid-large ad agency, where I passed the first interview, then was given a timed online technical where 60 minutes was allotted to write vanilla JS and build one toggle button whose text/styling would toggle, and a second button that replaced an href in an anchor... 60 minutes for that. I finished it in 5, then spent another 3-5ish minutes writing comments just to show attention to detail and care for potential others having to work with whatever I wrote. You know what the response was? "Sorry, but we're looking for someone who has a bit more technical experience". I shit you not. It was laughable.
To top it off, I've been ghosted a few times, which has been a new experience. One guy even had the balls to reach out to me a month later, after saying he was going to setup an interview with his team two days after we had what seemed like an awesome call, but then he ghosted lol.
At this point, after feeling left burned, I'm saying fuck it and taking a break from interviewing to work on my own projects for the time being, with the hope of becoming at least somewhat financially independent/less reliant on an employer. The application/interview process is such an incredibly disheartening process and I feel for anyone who has also been ran through the wringer.
