r/InterviewVip

I'm a 26-year-old guy, and I always knew that college wasn't going to be my path, so I went to truck driving school and got my CDL. I've been working as a garbage collector for about 3 years now, and for some reason I still feel embarrassed when I say that's my job.

The thing is, the job is good. The benefits are nice, the hours aren't bad, and I'm making $27 an hour now. And honestly, I can see myself continuing in it for a long time.

But every time someone asks me what I do for work, I get this weird feeling of embarrassment before I answer. I know that probably sounds silly, but it's bothering me. Am I supposed to feel this way?

I came across this subreddit by chance, read quite a few posts, and the thing that caught my attention is that there are a lot of questions and hot takes, but not many pieces of advice that people can use. And some of the advice is honestly very bad.

Quick background so you understand where I'm coming from: I work in tech now, but before that I worked as a cabinetmaker, worked in the fishing/marine field as a captain and did all kinds of hard labor, was a designer, and spent more than 28 years leading Product teams with titles like VP, EVP, and CPO. I worked at huge companies, smaller companies, and started 3 companies, one of which I ran as CEO.

So, with the risk that this may sound a bit preachy, here are my thoughts:

People hire coworkers. Meaning people they like, people who are roughly at the same competence level as the team (not necessarily the same level of experience), people who complement those around them, people they can rely on, and people who solve problems without needing every tiny step explained to them. Even in jobs that look simple from the outside, being someone who can figure things out and understand what's going on is a huge advantage. You need to give the impression that you're someone they would like to work with. Ideally, by the end of the interview, the interviewer is hoping you do well.

How do you do that? You go into the interview prepared to tell stories that are interesting and show your value. A lot of interviewers aren't especially good at interviewing, so you need to give them something useful to work with.

These days, I screen for 5 things when I hire someone. I think they're useful in almost any job: Grit, Integrity, Empathy, Creativity, and Curiosity.

If you can demonstrate those five qualities through real examples, your chances become much better. What do I mean?

Grit: This is your ability to finish something even when things get messy. You want to show that you take initiative, that you can identify what's blocking you and deal with it (and sometimes that means asking for help, especially if you're still early in your career), and that you don't fall apart the moment something becomes frustrating.

Prepare a story that shows your grit. Talk about a difficult problem you had to get through. Give a brief version of the context, explain what got in your way, and describe what you did. If this is your first job or you're still junior (2-4 years), it doesn't have to be a work story. It could be from school/university, family, volunteering, a side project, anything. A good story can also be a situation where you realized something was above your current skill level, so you went to a manager or someone with more experience, got the right help, and still took responsibility for getting it done. Sometimes showing good judgment and humility is better than pretending you carried everything by yourself through sheer force. But if you're more senior, then I'll probably want to see that you can move things forward without needing a lot of hand-holding.

Integrity: Are you dependable? Can people trust you? One way to show this is to tell a story about a time when you faced a real ethical choice, and choosing to do the right thing cost you something. Or, if you're willing to be more honest, talk about a time when you made a wrong decision and learned from it. I don't mean ""I accidentally sent the wrong file"" or ""I missed a deadline."" I mean a time when you knew what the right thing was, chose wrong anyway, and had to deal with the consequences. If you use this kind of example, the point has to be what changed afterward and why it won't happen again. This matters more if there's anything in your history that might show up in a basic background check or a quick social media search. A little vulnerability in an interview, especially around integrity, can make the person in front of you start to empathize with you and root for your success.

Empathy: This is the ability to see a situation from another person's point of view and let that affect your behavior. I would prepare a story about a time when you had difficulty working with someone. Maybe you didn't like them. Maybe they were driving you crazy. Then something became clear and you understood what pressure they were under, what they cared about, or why they were acting that way. From there, maybe you built a strong relationship, or maybe you simply found a practical way to cooperate with a difficult person. Either version can show empathy and your ability to work with people who aren't easy.

Creativity: This may be harder to bring out naturally. When I interview people, I ask a lot of questions designed to get to this point. You don't need to put on a performance or try to look like a genius founder. Just be ready with a story about solving a problem in a non-obvious way. It could be a small business you tried, a community project, fixing a broken process at work, a fundraiser, a school project, even something like organizing a snow-shoveling route as a teenager. Sometimes I ask candidates to tell me about an idea they had for a company, product, nonprofit, or service and why that idea interests them. Then I ask them to think through several parts of it. Not because I'm expecting a perfect business plan, but because it shows whether they can think through an idea logically or whether they freeze as soon as their first answer is challenged.

Curiosity: This is the thing people forget. I want to know whether you want to understand things, or whether you're just trying to say the right words. Curious people ask better questions, learn faster, and often improve the people around them. A good example could be a time when you taught yourself a tool, or asked enough questions to understand why a process existed, or noticed something strange and kept digging until you found the real problem. It doesn't have to be dramatic. It just has to show that you don't stop at the surface.

I hope this helps. Remember that hiring managers are trying to imagine you as part of the team. They're asking: ""Can this person do the work?"" but also ""Do I want to work with this person every week?"" So you need to let them see enough of your real personality for them to be able to make that decision. I've eliminated people from an interview process because they were so guarded that I couldn't get any sense of who they actually were.

One more thing: while they're interviewing you, you also need to interview them. Prepare strong questions. Read about the company before you go. Have a clear reason why you want this job in particular, not just any job. And if you don't like the people interviewing you, try to understand whether these are people you'll be working with regularly or just people in the process. Sometimes a job isn't worth taking if you know from the start that you don't like the people."

I'm 47 years old, married, and I have 3 kids and a mortgage and all of that. After working for almost 15 years as a software QA manager, I found out a few days ago, while I was traveling with my family, that I'm going to be laid off. The company is moving the entire QA team overseas. They offered me a "bonus" if I stay with them for another 10 weeks to help train the people who will take my place.

I know I'm supposed to be grateful that I have a little extra time to figure things out, and I really am, but I'm sitting here staring at the ceiling, thinking about my family, stressed out and absolutely terrified. My wife's income is very low, so most of the responsibility is on me. Honestly, I feel like I'm on the edge of a nervous breakdown.

I don't even know what the first step should be. Update my resume? Start applying now? Talk to a recruiter? I'm terrified and trying not to let it show in front of my family. Any advice, guidance, or even a few words from people who have been through this would be very much appreciated.

For about 14 months, my manager has made it a habit to keep reminding me how "lucky" I am to have a job here. He dumps work on me that has nothing to do with my role, pressures me to stay late without logging the hours, rejects almost every idea I bring up, monitors every tiny thing I do, and somehow still finds a way to blame me when his own problems grow and blow up. It got to the point where just seeing his name pop up on my phone makes my stomach turn, because most likely he's coming in to yell at me about something I didn't even cause.

I asked for the work situation to change and for him to treat me like a human being. He basically said no. Then he took it further and told me I should be grateful for this position, that I'm not putting in enough effort, and that I won't find anything better anywhere else.

Turns out he was wrong. I've been quietly applying and doing interviews over the last 7 weeks, and now I have 8 offers. I'm about to sign the official paperwork for a better role that pays 52k more. The person who interviewed me will be my new manager, and they spoke to me with genuine respect, which was honestly shocking, but in the best possible way.

I'm writing my resignation letter now and I genuinely can't stop smiling.

Sometimes the smartest way to show your manager that they underestimated you is to be ready for the next opportunity that opens up in front of you. This requires good interview preparation that gives you the confidence . I recently came across a guide about job interview tips and found it may be useful for both of us.

Honestly, I'm exhausted and burned out from working in food service, and I'm making basically nothing. I feel tired and suffocated, while at the same time I see people here venting about being bored in their office jobs, working maybe a few hours a day, and making close to 120k.

I'm asking seriously: how does someone get into that kind of work? What experience do you need, what degree, what certificates, or what connections? Any advice would make a difference for me.

I've basically been working my whole life, and my last few jobs were real careers. I was an employee and then a business owner for 17 years, and I had around 10-14 employees in the restaurant/bar industry. I left a job in state corrections after 9 years because some family circumstances came up with my aging parents, and I needed to change my path.

I've been applying for jobs on Indeed here in California and getting nowhere. What I've noticed is that if I see a job posted there, then go directly to the company's own website and apply, at least my chances of getting an interview are better. But after the interview it's either complete silence, or the polite email saying, "We've decided to move forward with other candidates."

I also applied to a private for-profit nursing program because I'm trying to get into a stable career that I might be able to use to increase my retirement income and work in as my last career. I'm not trying to be picky, I'm just trying to find something stable and logical long-term.

Am I crazy, doing something wrong, or just not understanding how bad the job market is right now? Or is the problem me? I always hear that employers can't find qualified people, but I can't even get an entry-level job after 6 months.

Guys, I'm currently drowning in the chaos of job hunting. This was the third time I've gone through 8 interviews and still didn't get the job. The last time this happened, they at least had a logical explanation and we handled it well. There were no weird feelings, and they even referred me to a few other companies.

This time, though, it was 8 interviews and 3 assignments, and honestly that's an insane amount of "free work" for them to expect from someone. One assignment is fine, especially since the jobs I'm applying for are pretty senior and in the $170-220K range.

I went through the whole process, spoke with almost everyone, and near the end the founder was talking about reference checks and preparing an offer.

Then suddenly they rejected me because I'm currently self-employed (which is only because I can't find full-time work).

I was clear from the very first question in the first call that I'm self-employed and have my own small agency, so for them to drag me through the rest of the process made the whole thing feel like BS.

In the end, I spoke with the founder and he admitted the mistake. I told him that based on what happened, I would send an invoice for the time I spent in the process - and he agreed.

I sent them the invoice and they paid it within a few hours.

But honestly, what is going on in this market? I'm so tired of these drawn-out hiring processes. They also disappeared on me for almost two weeks and I had to keep chasing them. There's no sense that there's an actual human being on the other side of these things.

Corporate America can be very harsh, but this situation hurt me in a way I didn't expect.

About nine months ago, I recommended someone strongly for a senior role at my company. We had worked together before, so I figured I could definitely trust him to be honest with me about what was happening above my job level.

Turned out to be the wrong decision.

A little over a month before I was laid off, and after another colleague had been removed from the job, I directly asked this person to give me a heads-up if my name started coming up in any conversations.

And then it happened. A random meeting appeared on my calendar, and I sent him a direct message: Do I need to be worried about this?

"Not at all, it's just a quick sync."

Honestly, I've lost all the trust I had in management.

A few friends from different circles recently said how much they make per year from their office jobs. Honestly, I was shocked. I've never made more than 72k a year, and most of my work has been blue collar.

So I started asking them more directly what they do at work. And when they give me a clean, polished job-description answer, I ask them what they literally do on a normal day, hour by hour. That's when I find myself buried in vague, stretchy language like stakeholder calls and reporting and dashboards and strategy and process improvement, but without any clear explanation of the skill they learned that makes them deserve that salary. It comes across like a bunch of disconnected office terms dressed up to look useful.

As someone who works blue collar, I can sit there and talk until morning about what I fix, what we move, what we clean, what I build, and exactly how that makes the employer money or keeps things running. I don't understand why it seems hard for them to do the same thing.

Maybe my friends are so much smarter that they don't know how to explain their jobs in normal-people language. Or maybe they don't explain it because there isn't much to explain in the first place, and somehow they found themselves in a comfortable position that pays way better than anything I've been able to reach.

One friend was somewhat honest and told me she maybe does four hours of actual work on a normal day, from home, and gets most of it done while half-listening to Teams meetings. She's a product operations analyst, which is as vague to me as the explanation she gave me of what she does.

I work hard. And I'm always told that my work is good. People trust me with the shitty jobs and the urgent stuff. But when it comes to promotions or better pay or moving up, I'm basically invisible.

I feel like I'm playing the game wrong, and it's eating at me more than I want to admit.

How exactly am I playing it wrong? Are these skills really that specialized if they can't explain them without corporate fog? Or is my feeling right that a lot of private-sector white-collar work in America in 2026 is just some weird economic shell game that doesn't add much real value to anything?

A few months ago, after about ten years of trying to get pregnant, my husband (34M) and I (35F) were blessed with a beautiful, healthy baby boy. My husband and I are Black, and that's important to the story.

We were over the moon. Our families, friends, and his coworkers had all been waiting for the news with us and cheering us on. After I gave birth, my husband sent the birth announcement to the office along with a picture of our son.

About three weeks later, my husband came home extremely upset after his first shift back at work. One of his coworkers told him that another man in the office, a fairly new employee whom my husband barely interacted with, had been going around running his mouth to anyone who would listen, saying there was no way my husband could be our son's father because "the baby is way too light for him and his hair is way too soft. That's a white man's baby, or maybe Asian."

Apparently, this man had been telling people that my husband was being fooled, and that he was so happy to finally be a father that he wasn't noticing the obvious: that I had cheated on him and gotten pregnant by someone else.

Quick note for anyone who somehow still doesn't know this in 2026: a lot of Black babies are very light when they're newborns, and their skin can darken over the next month or so. Their hair texture can gradually change too. Our son was exactly like that, and now he looks like someone shrank my husband in the dryer.

My husband confronted the man immediately and asked him what his problem was. Of course, the man denied saying anything like that and claimed he had only been joking, saying the baby was "so beautiful" that he couldn't possibly be my husband's son. But other people in the office confirmed what the first coworker had said. And it wasn't just one stupid comment either. He had clearly been trying to turn his little "theory" into some weird office gossip, like Sherlock Holmes in a cubicle.

Fortunately, the man was moved to a different schedule about 10 days later, so after that my husband didn't really have to deal with him much. Or so we thought.

Last weekend, my husband's company had a family event, and we took our son and went. We were talking with my husband's boss when suddenly, guess who inserted himself into the conversation like he belonged there: Brown Noser McMouth himself. He interrupted us, introduced himself to the boss, and shook his hand.

As soon as I realized who he was, all the anger came rushing back. I said to him: "I don't think we've met before, but you're the guy who went around the office telling people I cheated on my husband with a white or Asian man and that our son couldn't possibly be his?"

His face turned red and he didn't say a word. The boss looked at him and said, "Be in my office first thing Tuesday," and walked away.

I have a feeling he's going to lose his job. My husband thinks I went too far, because from his point of view the matter had been contained and resolved. I told him that for me, it wasn't resolved until I got to say something too, especially since I was the one being accused of cheating. Am I wrong?

A few weeks ago, I had a final round interview at a Fintech company in the growth stage. It was a panel of three. Usually, I review the STAR method and prepare my answers, but this time I decided to see who I would actually be talking to.
I spent about three hours scrolling through their LinkedIn profiles. I wasn't just looking at their names; I wanted to know what their backgrounds were. I noticed a pattern very quickly - all three had spent 3 to 5 years in small bootstrapped startups before coming here. One of them even tried to start a niche consulting business but wasn't very successful.
That's when I got the gist of it. These people don't care about big corporate bureaucracy. They are used to building things from scratch, and it seemed like they missed that vibe. They chose this company specifically because it's still a bit unpolished.
So, I decided to throw away the corporate script I had prepared. Instead of talking about how I managed a project that reached 50,000 users, I focused on the "ugly" wins. I told them about a time I had to create a custom onboarding flow using Slack bots and manual SQL queries because we didn't have a budget for a proper CRM. I focused on stories where I had to wear five different hats just to keep things moving.
The vibe in the room changed completely at that moment. It didn't feel like an interrogation anymore; it was like a chat between people who had struggled together in the trenches. One of the leads laughed and told me, "Honestly, we're still dealing with some of that mess here."
In the end, I got the offer four days later. And the salary was higher than the range they had originally posted in the job description.
Honestly, that bit of research changed everything. It's a small effort, but its ROI is incredible. I'll be doing this for every screening call or interview from now on.

Hi everyone,

I cleared the Amazon SDE I Online Assessment on 3rd August and received my interview invite on 13th August. My interview is scheduled for 18th August (around 1 hour).

The email mentions:

Up to 2 interview rounds

1 Technical Interview

1 Hiring Manager Round

The focus areas are:

Data Structures & Algorithms

Problem Solving

GenAI Fluency

Amazon Leadership Principles

If anyone has recently completed the Amazon SDE I interview, could you please share your experience? I'd really appreciate knowing:

What kind of DSA questions were asked?

Was there any LLD/OOP or CS fundamentals?

What GenAI-related questions were asked?

Which Leadership Principles were emphasized?

Any tips to prepare in the last few days?

Any insights would be really helpful. Thanks in advance!

For most of my adult life, I bounced between retail jobs and admin/office work, but a while ago I randomly applied for an industrial job with good pay, nice benefits, the whole thing. I spent a lot of time reading about the trade, somehow had a great interview, and they offered me the job.

The place I work at now is about 85% men, and a lot of the women there are in office roles. Not many of them are out there doing the hands-on skilled trade work that I do. My crew is all men, most of them in their mid-40s to early 60s. I'm 31.

Before I started, honestly, I was bracing myself for the worst. I expected them to talk down to me, or treat me like a child, or have to deal with creepy comments all the time. But my crew turned out to be really great. They treat me like I actually belong there. I'm learning a somewhat difficult skill set, and when something finally clicks for me, they're genuinely happy for me. Sure, I've gotten a few strange looks and some staring from men in other areas, but it's nowhere near as bad as I had built it up in my head.

I really wish more women would consider skilled trades. I never expected to enjoy work like this, let alone feel proud of what I'm learning every day. The work can be satisfying in a way I never found in customer service or sitting at a desk, and the people who will accept you might surprise you.