u/Important-Wish-2247

ok this is gonna be a long one sorry, tl;dr at the bottom.

ive been laid off about a month, savings are getting kinda tight, and folks in this sub keep telling me to "just pay for one of the live interview ai things" and stop being weird about money. i kept refusing on principle. so i set aside 2 weeks and went hunting to see if a genuinely free ai interview assistant that actually works is a real thing that exists or if its just marketing. heres where i landed.

biggest single realization, before any of the rest. interview ai is two completely separate problems and people lump em together. one is prep, all the work BEFORE the call. drilling behavioral questions, system design rehearsal, mock answers in front of the bathroom mirror. the other is live, the actual interview, where you need an answer in real time and the interviewer can not catch you. the free interview ai that works for one absolutely does not work for the other. i had to learn that one by getting caught.

ok prep first. for prep, free is fully viable and im a convert. i ended up with 3 things i actually use. first is the giant general chatbot that everyone is on, free tier on the web, paste a job description in, ask for the 15 most likely behavioral questions for that role, then i pace around my apartment answering em out loud while my cat watches me look insane. second was a different free open notebook style tool, similar vibe, plug in the company and the role, ask it to walk me thru 3 design questions theyve asked in past loops. and the third was a free ai voice tool that lets you talk to it like a real person, sounds dumb but its the closest thing to a fake interviewer ive found. all 3 are zero dollars and all 3 are good. for prep, a free ai interview assistant absolutely does work and you do not need anything fancier.

now live. tried using any of those same tools on a real Zoom and the wheels came off. propping the chatbot on my phone next to my laptop got me caught the second i looked down too long. interviewer literally said "you ok" and i nearly threw up. tabbing to a browser tool on my own laptop shows up immediately on the screen share, you can see the tab change. one of the dedicated interview ai things gives you a 5 min free session which is not enough time to even get past the intros. another capped me at 15 min and died right when the system design portion started, which was, lets just say, character building. for the live part, free as a working option basically does not exist outside one specific edge case.

the edge case is the free tier on a real purpose built interview ai (not a general chatbot, an actual dedicated tool). they exist but the limits are real. the one i landed on gives a small bucket of minutes per month free, which is enough to dry run a full mock or use it on a quick 20 min recruiter screen but not enough to carry a full 60 min loop. for that you have to upgrade. its the only free interview ai that works on the live side at all in my testing.

so the math i ended up with. for prep, free is fully fine, dont pay anyone. for live, the free tier on the right dedicated tool gets you partway, and if youre interviewing more than the occasional short call you eventually have to pay. the sub was right and i was being weird about it. the cheap end of the dedicated tool market is roughly a weeks worth of coffee if you commit annual, and there is one option specifically where the entry price is so low that the principle of "i refuse to pay" stops being economically rational. ill drop the exact name and pricing in the comments cuz i dont want the body to read like an ad.

before i name names, asking the sub. is there a free ai interview assistant that 1, gives genuinely unlimited live minutes (not just a small monthly bucket), and 2, hides itself from screen share without you alt-tabbing? cuz i went deep and the answer i got was no. id rather pay zero than anything if i missed something obvious. and if your conclusion ended up the same as mine (free for prep, pay for live), what is the cheapest dedicated tool you have actually used and not regretted? a couple of folks who got laid off the same week as me are asking what to grab and i want to forward a clean answer. thanks

tl;dr: free is fine for prep (i use 3 free things). free does not really work for live calls (5 min trials, 15 min caps, screen share detection). free tier on a real dedicated tool is the only thing that gets you anywhere on live, and even then the bucket is small. paid is cheap if you go annual. naming names in the comments.

Hey everyone,
I work in the tech field and have a problem that I know might seem like a great thing from the outside, but it's genuinely bothering me. I don't have enough work to fill my day. My official hours are from 8 to 5, but I usually only do real, productive work for two or three hours at most. The rest of the time, I'm literally sitting around doing nothing.

Don't get me wrong, the salary is good and the job is fully remote, so on paper, it seems like an amazing opportunity. But honestly, the idea of staring at the screen with nothing to do for more than 5 hours every day is starting to drive me crazy.

And this isn't a new thing. It happened at my last job, and the two before that as well. So that's four different companies so far. I've worked as a systems admin, for a period in project management, and now I'm in a more specialized tech role, and the pattern never changes.

Since this has happened at several companies and in different roles, I've started to ask myself if maybe the problem is me. Is this normal in the field? Are other people just good at looking busy or are they okay with all this free time? That's why I wanted to ask you all here: how many hours do you work in your day?