u/remoteDev1

Most of the time you never find out what actually happened after you leave the call. You get the email or you don't.

This one was different. She called me an hour and a half after my final round, and she'd already talked to the CTO. She told me what went well, where I lost them, and what he actually said.

He didn't say my code was bad. He didn't say I got a question wrong. He said: "I'm not sure he gets where we're heading."

(And I'm sitting there thinking, come on. Why is everyone this picky right now? The market is out of control. Let me actually work there and I'll figure out where we're heading. Of course I don't know yet. I haven't worked a single day at your company!)

It's not about the code. It's about whether I understood what they're trying to build. And nobody gets you ready for that part.

Now think about how you actually prepare. You grind the code. You sharpen your skills. You build demo apps that look roughly like the thing you'd be doing on the job. You figure you've covered it. And no, not even close. They can just ask where you see yourself in five years, they don't like the answer, and that's it. Doesn't matter what code you write. Doesn't matter what you built. Doesn't matter how many points you scored. You're out.

Once I saw it, I saw it everywhere. Three out of four finals I had inside one month came down to the same thing.

The one thing I do differently now is I ask what they said. At the end of every interview I ask the recruiter to come back and tell me the feedback. About half of them do, and I've learned more from those than from the interviews.

Has this happened to you? You prep for weeks, and then they ask something you weren't ready for, or they nitpick something you can't even see, or your shirt is the wrong color. Anything like that?

https://reddit.com/link/1voleg5/video/iahtugz91fjh1/player

I run my own business and I still have to send faxes. Not often, and usually at the last minute.

What annoyed me is that every app for it wants a monthly or weekly subscription. I don't like subscriptions. I didn't want a plan sitting there, I wanted to pay for the fax I'm actually sending.

I looked for one that worked that way and couldn't find it. So I built it.

You point your phone at the page on your desk. It turns it into a proper fax page, black and white, flattened, straightened out. Add more pages if you need them, put in the number and who it's from, send. You can see whether it went through.

You buy a small pack of faxes and they sit there until you use them. That's it. No subscription, nothing to cancel.

I've been using it for my own faxes for a couple of weeks now.

It's called FaxGo.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/faxgo/id6796798069

If anyone here deals with faxes, help yourself.

One thing I'm curious about. Everyone told me consumable credits are a worse business than subscriptions. Has anyone here shipped on credits instead? How did it go for you?

I had an interview with a hiring manager recently, and somewhere in the middle he told me how he actually goes through resumes.

He said he doesn't start by looking for the people he likes. He starts by looking for reasons to reject. Anything that gives him a reason to say no, that resume is out. Once the pile is small enough he goes back through what's left, picks the best ones, and those are the people he calls.

He wasn't being rude about it. He's got a stack of applications and a day job. I get why it works that way.

But it's been bugging me since.

If you've got a gap, just saying so feels more honest than hiding it and acting like you've been perfect the whole time. Except honest is exactly what gets you cut first. A gap is a reason to say no. The person who wrote around it never gave him one.

So the cleaned up version wins over the real one. And right now it's hard to be honest and still get picked.

What do you think, is that the right way to do it?

And how do you write yours? Do you put your gaps in, or do you write it so it lines up with the posting perfectly?

Just had one of the more interesting interviews I've had in a while, wanted to share it.

It was booked as a first round. Usually that means a recruiter. Where are you located, what are you looking for, what's your range, that kind of thing.

Instead it was the CTO. And about ten minutes in, out came an algorithm question. A real one, the kind I'd expect in a final round.

End of the work day, too. You're not braced for it, and your brain is in a different place than it is at 10 in the morning.

I got the direction right but didn't take it all the way. Not my best work, not a disaster either.

Now I wait.

Anyway, heads up. If you've got a "quick intro call" on the calendar at a small company, the person on the other end might be an engineer, and it might not stay an intro call.

Has this happened to anyone else? Curious how common it actually is.

I lost my job recently, and like a lot of people here, I've been having a hard time finding another one.

A recruiter messaged me on LinkedIn and said he had remote jobs. He asked for my resume, so I asked him to send me the job description first. A few messages later, he wrote:

"However, we do charge candidates $500 to enroll them."

$500 just to put my name in their system. He hadn't even shown me a single job yet.

People who are out of work are already stressed and short on money, so asking them for $500 just feels wrong. I told him I don't pay recruiters and ended the chat.

Has anyone else gotten messages like this? What were they asking you to pay for?

Does Workday even worth spending the time on? I noticed when I upload my resume it doesnt map my experience correctly, which is annoying, so I have to retype everything. Plus do recruiters even care about those fields when you already attached your resume? Anyone have real experience with this? Curious what you all think about Workday overall.

Yeah, it happened. Classic beginner mistake. The recruiter and I played ping pong:

- he asked what salary I was expecting

- I said I'm flexible as long as it stays in a US range

- he passed back: "But what are you actually targeting?"

- I passed back: "What's your client's budget for this?"

- he pushed again: "I'd like to hear your range so I have something to work from"

Then I caved and gave a number. It came in about 25K under. I didn't get the role anyway. So I walked away feeling lose twice: no offer, and pushed 25K down.

How do you negotiate and talk salary in the early rounds?

Interviewed at a company. They're rewriting a legacy project onto Next.js and AWS.

Right as we start, the guy goes: rely on your own skills, no AI. Then: we're so tired of running interviews where people just read the answers off their screen.

And I'm sitting there like, yeah, reading AI off the screen, sure. But I've been building with AI nonstop lately. Pretending it doesn't exist is a bit of a stretch. Anyway. Moving on.

He gives me a task I had to write by hand. I write it, answer everything. At the end he goes: if we'd caught you on ChatGPT, we'd have ended this in the first five minutes. So thanks for not using it. And I'm thinking: sure, and I'm absolutely using it again tonight.

Some questions I couldn't answer cleanly. Plenty I did, just not perfectly. No offer. Keep applying, folks.

Cheers.

an engineer i interviewed with told me about the wildest thing hes done with an llm. not my project, but i cant stop thinking about it. he fed his whole teams git history into a model, not to look at the code but to understand the people on it. and it read them back to him. by his own words it "knew things about our personal lives... just based off our commits and our messages." he called it "kind of scary" and also his favorite thing hes ever done with an llm.

thats the part i keep circling. its useful in a way thats hard to wave off. imagine joining a team and knowing how to work with everyone on day one instead of after six months. its also a quiet violation. nobody wrote those commit messages expecting to get fed to a model and read back as a character profile, and theres no consent anywhere in it. clever and a little wrong at the same time, and i dont think one cancels the other. is this the smartest use of an llm ive heard in a while, or the thing were all going to wish nobody figured out how to do.

best interview i had in this whole job search ended in a rejection. still thinking about it, so im writing it down.

small healthcare startup. 5 engineers, maybe 15 people total. the guy interviewing me was the most senior technical person there, reported straight to the ceo. he described himself as "just an engineer, in the trenches, no red tape." what they do is keep chronically ill patients out of the hospital. they sit between the medical practice and the insurance payer and try to catch people getting worse months before it turns into an ER visit.

right away it didnt feel like an interview. felt like two engineers talking. he kept stopping me with stuff like "you touched on so many good things, i have so many questions." he wasnt grilling me, he was trading. i described a big-data tagging pipeline i worked on and instead of nodding he said "you were on the exact right track" and then walked me through his own version of the same thing.

here is the part i cant shake.

i have a second degree in theology next to the cs one. a close friend of mine, a priest, one year older than me, died from a gastro problem. he didnt notice what was happening to his body until he was already in the ER. it went fast. and this company builds the exact thing that catches that kind of slow slide months early. i told him on the call, if my friend had had something like what you are building he would probably still be here. that landed in the first 90 seconds and the whole conversation changed after it.

when we got to the technical part he said "i want to see you solve a real problem. you don't have to write the code, i don't care about that crap. you can use LLMs, however you want to solve it." and then later, "i've had so many interviews where the guy's faking it on the other side. i can tell he doesn't work with LLMs. i know you do. you kind of already passed that test."

he closed the round with "i think you are a good fit. so i would like to move on to the next round." and then, "this was like my favorite interview i've had so far."

second round was a real problem. build a system to catch the patients who are going to get hospitalized before it happens. i got through it. two rounds deep, past the technical bar. closest i got to an offer the whole search.

a week later the email came. only real human rejection i got in the whole search, so im quoting the whole thing:

"I really had a good time talking with you and getting to know how you tackle real problems with AI. Unfortunately, this role requires extensive experience with healthcare and navigating the challenges that arise inside a HIPAA and SOC2 regulated environment. I don't doubt you could figure it out, you're a strong engineer, but we really need someone stepping into this seat who already has the industry reps. The regulatory side isn't something I can have a leader learning on the job here. That's the only reason. You made the call harder, not easier."

thats it. no ghosting, no "we went with another candidate" copy-paste. a real reason. and the reason had nothing to do with whether i could do the work.

best conversation i had in months and it still ended in a no. i dont really have a clean lesson here. just that "you made the call harder, not easier" has been sitting in my chest for two weeks.

I hope my story bring a little light to your darkness and no hope with all this mess that is going on with the tech job market. just know that you are not alone - there is 500+ candidates on that role you just applied :)

cheers!

my old team got laid off friday with one day of laptop access. this is the list i texted them at 9am

got cut in February. friday it was my old team. 25 people, one day of access, everything locks at 6pm.

first text i got was "what do i even save". so i sent the list i wish someone had sent me in February. posting it here because same-day lockouts are apparently the norm now.

the list, in the order that matters:

W-2s and every paystub. not just the last one. you need year to date numbers for unemployment and for anchoring your next salary. most people remember this at tax season, which is too late.

offer letter plus any bonus or comp statements. if there's a severance conversation later, numbers on paper beat memory every time.

performance reviews, every cycle you can reach. interviews want receipts. and if the layoff ever needs a lawyer looking at it, reviews are page one.

benefits summary. screenshot it. COBRA math has deadlines and doing it from memory is how people overpay.

401k: log into the custodian site directly, not through company SSO, and change the email to a personal one. five figure accounts go missing this way more often than you'd think.

pending expense reports. that deadline is days, not weeks.

your own files. photos, notes, code thats actually yours. nothing that isn't.

after the downloads: file unemployment the same week. and dont sign the separation agreement on day one. group layoff and over 40 means the law gives you 45 days to consider it. the offer doesn't expire because you read it slowly.

Main lesson. do the first three tonight while you still have a job. from your couch, 20 minutes. the people scrambling on friday weren't careless. nobody told them the laptop dies same-day now.

whats on your list that i missed?

shipped a free resume tool after my layoff. just crossed 1000 users. update from the 678 post

few of you might remember my post about 6 weeks ago when i was at 678 users. just crossed 1000 today. wanted to come back with what actually changed in the product between then and now.

context: laid off from a staff eng role early last year. wife, 4 kids, no salary. instead of doom scrolling i started building jobbi, an AI resume tailoring tool that matches your real experience to the JD without inventing skills you dont have. free, no paywall, no email gate.

what flipped between 678 and 1000:

opened mixpanel and the funnel was uglier than i thought. 55% bounce at the login wall, 67% drop at the "paste your JD" screen. activation rate sitting at 14%. shipped a demo screen that lets you see what tailoring looks like before you sign up. pre-filled sample JDs for the lazy first try. activation climbed to mid-30s within a week.

then i killed my own pricing model. had a 7 day pro trial nobody was converting on. switched to free forever with a $9 add-on for unlimited runs. 7 paying users became 14. $126 MRR. not life changing but real.

shipped a new guided interview mode for people whose resumes are too thin to tailor well. instead of asking you to paste a JD, it walks you through 6 questions about each role and pulls bullets out of your actual stories. that one feature added 15% to activation on its own. turns out a lot of people dont have a good master resume to start with.

still cant figure out: why is growth so streaky? some weeks 30 signups, some weeks 200. cant find the variable. if anyones shipped before and solved this id love to hear it.

biggest lesson from 1000: most of the value isnt the AI part. its forcing people to write down what they actually did at work. 90% of resumes ive read describe duties instead of wins. AI just makes the rewriting fast. the thinking still has to happen.

free if you want to try it, jobbi.app. mostly im here for feedback though. what would you build different at this scale?

Interview with an edtech company. Director of Engineering. Before the call, the recruiter told me clearly: "during this interview, rely on your own thinking, not on AI tools."

First interview where I heard a direct ban on AI tools during the call.

The interview started the usual way - questions about my background. Then the usual stops on specific roles, going deeper into the work.

Then 14 technical questions back to back. AWS deployment. CSRF. How to handle sensitive data. Debugging legacy code on a Friday evening when everyone is on vacation, no tools allowed. (by the way, the legacy debugging scenario I proposed myself, it is from my actual past)

The Director's closing was mixed-positive: "you answered some things very well. There are answers that would need more exploration in another round. I would not say you did badly." I told him:

yeah, not ideal, but I did not use any helpers, no AI tools, I just talked with you the whole time.

His response:

I would have known. If you had used AI tools, I would have ended this call in the first 5 minutes.

Main lesson. Part of the industry is tired of interviewing chatgpt. They are putting HR-level guardrails against AI in synchronous rounds. And they are actively watching for the tells. Knowing fundamentals without auto-complete is a requirement again.

If you have an interview where AI is banned, study one evening: AWS compute (ECS / EC2 / Lambda - when which), CSRF basics, how to store and log PII, how to debug without prod access. That covers most of these interviews.

Final round with a local media startup. 3-person engineering team. CTO for 90 minutes.

After we walked through my take-home, 15 minutes in he opens their own live site. Pulls up the homepage. Asks: "imagine you are an advertiser. You look at this page. Would you pay for a banner ad? Or hesitate? What specifically would stop you?"

(my reaction: what the hell? this again? am I another lab rat for you? why are you asking me this? if you need product validation, hire someone, pay them, get validation. what does this have to do with a software engineer?)

I compared it to Axios. Said placeholder photography cheapens the feel. The CTO narrowed his eyes (he probably did not love the answer).

What I should have said (figured out 3 days later): "the top 3 articles all use the same AI-stylized photo aesthetic. An advertiser would assume the traffic is bot-inflated and walk. The fix is real photography, named local bylines, and one visible engagement metric per article like comments or shares. Basically everything that shows a real human made the post."

As a tip: if you have a final round at a startup soon, practice the question "what would a real paying customer think looking at this page" on 5 sites you use every day. Or what would you improve to make the product better.

My ending with this role - they went with someone else. By the way, the CTO really wanted me to push what I built to a public GitHub repo. I dont want to think this, but a creeping suspicion eats at me. What if the CTO (or whoever he actually is) just used me to build his site from scratch (he literally said they have nothing yet) using my time, my tokens, and my design decisions. I dont know guys, but I have this feeling I was used.

Lesson for me: next time, no public repo pushes until an offer is signed. What are your rules? What do you NOT hand over without paperwork from the company?

Honestly it feels like in 2026 interviews are turning into freework instead of hiring. Push to public, no NDA in the reverse direction, and "thanks for participating!" at the end. Anyone else recognize this?

side note: this is actually the second time this month a final round ended with "they picked a referral." starting to think the offer was decided before I even turned my camera on. if this keeps going I will start messaging every LinkedIn connection I have asking for a referral wherever I am applying.

another "final round" that turned into 90 minutes of free product consulting. write up below:

Final round with a local media startup. 3-person engineering team. CTO for 90 minutes.

After we walked through my take-home, 15 minutes in he opens their own live site. Pulls up the homepage. Asks: "imagine you are an advertiser. You look at this page. Would you pay for a banner ad? Or hesitate? What specifically would stop you?"

(my reaction: what the hell? this again? am I another lab rat for you? why are you asking me this? if you need product validation, hire someone, pay them, get validation. what does this have to do with a software engineer?)

I compared it to Axios. Said placeholder photography cheapens the feel. The CTO narrowed his eyes (he probably did not love the answer).

What I should have said (figured out 3 days later): "the top 3 articles all use the same AI-stylized photo aesthetic. An advertiser would assume the traffic is bot-inflated and walk. The fix is real photography, named local bylines, and one visible engagement metric per article like comments or shares. Basically everything that shows a real human made the post."

As a tip: if you have a final round at a startup soon, practice the question "what would a real paying customer think looking at this page" on 5 sites you use every day. Or what would you improve to make the product better.

My ending with this role - they went with someone else. By the way, the CTO really wanted me to push what I built to a public GitHub repo. I dont want to think this, but a creeping suspicion eats at me. What if the CTO (or whoever he actually is) just used me to build his site from scratch (he literally said they have nothing yet) using my time, my tokens, and my design decisions. I dont know guys, but I have this feeling I was used.

Lesson for me: next time, no public repo pushes until an offer is signed. What are your rules? What do you NOT hand over without paperwork from the company?

Honestly it feels like in 2026 interviews are turning into freework instead of hiring. Push to public, no NDA in the reverse direction, and "thanks for participating!" at the end. Anyone else recognize this?

side note: this is actually the second time this month a final round ended with "they picked a referral." starting to think the offer was decided before I even turned my camera on. if this keeps going I will start messaging every LinkedIn connection I have asking for a referral wherever I am applying.

Final round with a local media startup. 3-person engineering team. CTO for 90 minutes.

After we walked through my take-home, 15 minutes in he opens their own live site. Pulls up the homepage. Asks: "imagine you are an advertiser. You look at this page. Would you pay for a banner ad? Or hesitate? What specifically would stop you?"

(my reaction: what the hell? this again? am I another lab rat for you? why are you asking me this? if you need product validation, hire someone, pay them, get validation. what does this have to do with a software engineer?)

I compared it to Axios. Said placeholder photography cheapens the feel. The CTO narrowed his eyes (he probably did not love the answer).

What I should have said (figured out 3 days later): "the top 3 articles all use the same AI-stylized photo aesthetic. An advertiser would assume the traffic is bot-inflated and walk. The fix is real photography, named local bylines, and one visible engagement metric per article like comments or shares. Basically everything that shows a real human made the post."

As a tip: if you have a final round at a startup soon, practice the question "what would a real paying customer think looking at this page" on 5 sites you use every day. Or what would you improve to make the product better.

My ending with this role - they went with someone else. By the way, the CTO really wanted me to push what I built to a public GitHub repo. I dont want to think this, but a creeping suspicion eats at me. What if the CTO (or whoever he actually is) just used me to build his site from scratch (he literally said they have nothing yet) using my time, my tokens, and my design decisions. I dont know guys, but I have this feeling I was used.

Lesson for me: next time, no public repo pushes until an offer is signed. What are your rules? What do you NOT hand over without paperwork from the company?

Honestly it feels like in 2026 interviews are turning into freework instead of hiring. Push to public, no NDA in the reverse direction, and "thanks for participating!" at the end. Anyone else recognize this?

side note: this is actually the second time this month a final round ended with "they picked a referral." starting to think the offer was decided before I even turned my camera on. if this keeps going I will start spamming every LinkedIn connection I have asking for a referral wherever I am applying.

Round 2 interview with a mid-size company. Around 70 engineers, building agentic AI in a regulated industry. Principal SE + Staff SE. 90 minutes.

So they give me a coding take-home, basically — pull data from a public API, return in specific format. TypeScript + tests.

I open their spec. Click the URL. 404. (panic, I think — do they even know their whole thing is broken here? we are about to waste a ton of time and never get to the actual interview)

I ask, is this URL right? The Principal calmly says "yeah we are experimenting. You are the first candidate doing this assignment. Ask your AI to find the right URL."

(my internal voice: great, I'm your guinea pig, whats next on the menu)

I sat with that. Two options. Either the spec is genuinely broken and I am unlucky. Or this is a test of whether I will blindly trust their document. Picked option 2. It is the only version where I look fine either way.

Launched Claude Code with full context (AI use was pre-approved by them), handed it the broken URL, told it to find the right one. In parallel, I opened the API docs myself on a second screen. (the staff engineer liked this, immediately said "oh, nice, you are searching in parallel!" meanwhile I am thinking, dude I am just saving time so I do not fail your interview. in real life I would have gone for a coffee)

Found the working URL before the AI did. Around 80 seconds. The AI caught up about 40 seconds after.

Principal feedback: "super important. To trust what the LLM is doing, you have to make sure it is doing the right thing." (which I do anyway)

This was not a coding speed test. It was an AI verification test. I made it to the final round. They picked... a referral candidate from inside the company. Thanks for participating!

Tip: if your interview is for an agentic AI or Claude Code role in the next few months, assume part of the spec is broken on purpose. Read the docs yourself before you launch AI.

Round 2 interview with a mid-size company. Around 70 engineers, building agentic AI in a regulated industry. Principal SE + Staff SE. 90 minutes.

So they give me a coding take-home, basically - pull data from a public API, return in specific format. TypeScript + tests.

I open their spec. Click the URL. 404. (panic, I think - do they even know their whole thing is broken here? we are about to waste a ton of time and never get to the actual interview)

I ask, is this URL right? The Principal calmly says "yeah we are experimenting. You are the first candidate doing this assignment. Ask your AI to find the right URL."

(my internal voice: great, I'm your guinea pig, whats next on the menu)

I sat with that. Two options. Either the spec is genuinely broken and I am unlucky. Or this is a test of whether I will blindly trust their document. Picked option 2. It is the only version where I look fine either way.

Launched Claude Code with full context (AI use was pre-approved by them), handed it the broken URL, told it to find the right one. In parallel, I opened the API docs myself on a second screen. (the staff engineer liked this, immediately said "oh, nice, you are searching in parallel!" meanwhile I am thinking, dude I am just saving time so I do not fail your interview. in real life I would have gone for a coffee)

Found the working URL before the AI did. Around 80 seconds. The AI caught up about 40 seconds after.

Principal feedback: "super important. To trust what the LLM is doing, you have to make sure it is doing the right thing." (which I do anyway)

This was not a coding speed test. It was an AI verification test. I made it to the final round. They picked... a referral candidate from inside the company. Thanks for participating!

Tip: if your interview is for an agentic AI or Claude Code role in the next few months, assume part of the spec is broken on purpose. Read the docs yourself before you launch AI.