Money can buy the *opportunity* to achieve happiness (and so much more). That's the whole point of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.
F31
I am currently a SDE2 and have a total work experience of 8 years and working in one of the FAANG company for last 8 years and current l based out of India I want to move to UK but after applying through LinkedIn to over thousand openings haven’t received any calls from anywhere. Can someone help to guide me through which company offer visa sponsorship in UK and if there are any consultancy services I should book for this
My husband made a huge, very stupid mistake. He was supposed to be working from home, but decided to go to a nearby sports bar to watch a match. By chance, his manager was there for a work lunch and saw him. He was fired on the spot for time theft, and I'm furious with him.
He worked at this company for 8 years, so that's a huge part of his CV gone. He obviously can't use them as a reference. An old colleague who is now a manager elsewhere has offered to be his reference, which is a small comfort. I work, so we're not going to be bankrupt tomorrow, but our savings won't last us long. The pressure is immense.
What is the reality of the situation he's in? How is he supposed to explain this in an interview without being immediately rejected? some people told him to use ai tool to help him answer any questions regarding his old boss and job, will it work? will interviewman help in this situation or is there a better solution?
The company was small and the owner took it personally, so I'm sure they will tell anyone who asks exactly what happened if he tries to lie.
He is obviously very remorseful now, but I don't see how 'I'm sorry' is going to help him find a new job. I'm starting to get very worried and stressed. Honestly, any advice on how to handle this situation would be a great help. Thanks for reading.
sad reality
In short, I (M21) was fired from my full-time job because I asked for 10 days off from my paid leave balance to study for finals. This happened about 3 weeks ago.
Honestly, I was very lucky and got an offer and interview faster than I expected. The initial call went much more smoothly than I thought. The follow-up round was technical, so I tried the Interviewman AI tool that I had been seeing advertised a lot in the App Store. Honestly, it was surprisingly good. It picked up the interviewer's questions and gave me quick, organized answers that sounded professional without seeming awkward. I'm still waiting to hear back from them, but then suddenly something unexpected happened...
I found a message from my old boss telling me to come back to work as usual, and that he'll approve the leave too.
Honestly, I don't know what I'm supposed to do. When I first asked for the leave, he refused immediately. He told me there was a lot of work piled up and that he wouldn't be able to keep things running without me being there.
I should also mention that we had a new guy in our department who had only been there for about 3 weeks, and he asked for around 9 days off to go to his cousin's wedding. My manager approved it for him without any problem.
Now if I go back, I'll probably find about 5 weeks of piled-up work waiting for me because he fired me, and the other guy is still on his leave. I don't even know what to reply to him with.
If you're managing your college classes and this crazy job market at the same time, hang in there, more power to you!🫡
I was lucky to bag 3 intern offers as well as 3 full-time offers last year, all thanks to applying for 100s of roles a week. To find the right set of roles as soon as they dropped, I wrote a Python script to scan all Greenhouse job boards and catch them at scale. I'm sharing the live gsheet with y'all, it has 550+ open intern and new grad roles (SWE, AI, Quant/Finance, PM, Hardware).
It updates daily so you have a clear target list every day! I plan on adding Workday and Ashby to the sheet soon.
Having fresh job leads matters, and the three massive bottlenecks I figured out while going down the ATS rabbit hole:
1. Timing is everything. The data shows that roughly 80% of offers go to people who apply within the first 7 days of a listing.
2. Semantics matter way too much. I was applying for "AI Engineer" roles with "Machine Learning Engineer" on my resume. ATS parsers can be incredibly rigid. Literally just changing my past titles and headline to exactly match the target role had noticeably more callbacks.
3. Keyword stuffing backfires. Dumping keywords might get you past the initial ATS screen, but human recruiters will shoot it down with zero mercy. You have no choice but to actually embed exact phrases naturally into your bullet points.
Now there are tools you can use to automate most of these things. Even I'm building one to automate all of it under one roof. Happy to answer any questions in the comments about my experience, my findings on ATSes or my product in DMs/comments!
Since January Ive applied for 40+ roles and almost half didn't even acknowledge the application.
Interviews feel more competitive than ever, recruiters are overloaded, and every job post seems to amass 300 applicants within hours.
Its hard to stay consistent without letting the process wreck my confidence.
Biggest things I hear people say,
Anyone else finding the market unusually brutal right now, or is it just me?
can confirm I'd rather be dead than go into work tomorrow
ok so im 6 weeks into a layoff and my buddy rohan keeps telling me to just stop being weird about money and pay for one of the cheap interview ai things. ive been refusing on principle cuz no paycheck. spent a weekend trying to figure out if a genuinely free ai interview assistant for the LIVE part of an interview is a real thing that exists or if its just marketing. wanted to share where i landed in case anyone else is in the same hole.
so the giant chatbots first. the one everyone uses. i use the free version every day. paste the JD in the night before, ask for like ten likely behavioral questions, then i pace around my kitchen answering em out loud like a maniac while my dog stares at me. for prep this is great and basically free. you do NOT need anything more than that for prep. the issue is the live call. i tried to use it during a real interview by propping my phone next to my laptop on a Zoom and the lady running the interview caught me looking down for like 10 seconds typing into the chat. she paused and asked if i was ok and i wanted to die. so the free chatbot trick for the live call gets you caught the second something hard comes up. it works for prep, it does not work in real time during the interview itself.
ok then i went and tried the free trials of the actual purpose built interview ai things. lol this was rough. one of em caps the free trial at 15 mins. my interview ran 50. tool just disappeared on me halfway thru a system design question and i sat there sweating like an idiot while the interviewer waited. another one gives you 5 minutes free, which is hilarious cuz you cant even get past introductions in 5 mins. couple of the others have no free option at all, you pay or you walk. so practically speaking the free trial route is either too short to survive a real call, or its just not on the menu.
after all that. for offline prep before the interview, the free chatbots are fine, you dont need to spend a cent. for the live call portion that lasts 30 to 60 mins, free does not actually exist as a real option. the trial caps are short on purpose so you upgrade. i thought about cycling thru new emails every 15 mins on the capped trial but you cant do that on a panel interview without burning yourself, and also it just feels gross. so i caved and bought one of the cheap dedicated ones. rohan was right and im annoyed about it. the cheap end of the market is roughly what i spend on coffee in a week if you commit to the annual plan. above that the market is wild, some of these tools cost like an actual phone bill for one month, no idea who is paying that.
before i drop the name and exact price of the one i went with in the comments, asking the sub:
is there a truly free ai interview assistant that 1, carries you thru a full hour interview without dying or capping out, and 2, does not show up on the interviewers screen share? cuz i went pretty deep on this and came up dry on both counts. would much rather pay nothing than anything if i missed something. and if you came to the same conclusion (free = ok for prep, not ok for live), what is the cheapest dedicated tool you have actually used and not regretted? trying to send a short list to a friend who got laid off the same month and shes asking what to grab. thanks
i got my extension caught in a Google panel like 4 months ago. was screensharing a tab to walk thru a doc and the lil helper popup sat there in the corner of my shared screen. interviewer didnt say anything but the cursor hovered over it for a second. somehow still got the offer but i was sweating the whole way home. that is the origin story of why im typing this post.
still job hunting since then. got laid off feb 19. doing rounds at mid-sized tech places, mix of behavioral system design and some leetcode. went looking for a helper tool that wouldn't do what that extension did to me.
told myself upfront, no browser extensions. no mobile only apps either cuz im not sitting there with a phone propped up next to my laptop on a panel. just obvious to anyone watching. i want a real desktop download. runs on the mac for remote interviews, runs on the windows tower in the bedroom when im interviewing from there. Zoom Meet Teams, all of it.
two weeks of free trials later here are the patterns i found.
slow ones are useless. answer takes four or five seconds to show up after the question. in a real conversation thats forever. silence gets heavy. one of em was so laggy i actually bailed on a call and blamed my wifi.
session caps are worse than they sound. one had a hard 90 min cap. my Amazon virtual loop the week before went past 2 hours. cant have the thing dying on me halfway thru a behavioral round.
coding only apps are useless if you do anything besides leetcode. last week i had two system design rounds and three behaviorals. an app that knows binary search but cant help me talk about a time i had a conflict with a manager isnt solving the real problem.
browser extensions. installed one anyway just to confirm. yep, you can see it in the shared tab if you look. nope.
mobile clients. tried one. having ur phone propped up next to the laptop is the least subtle thing on earth. interviewer can see your eyes flicking off screen. gross.
i ended up on one im pretty happy with and ill drop the name in a comment cuz i dont want this post looking like a shill piece. honestly not even sure its the best one out there, its just the best of what i personally tried.
what im actually asking:
which desktop interview helper are u using rn?? how many real rounds have u done with it?? especially if ur interviewing at FAANG or anywhere the proctoring is aggressive. trying to figure out if mine holds up under a paranoid interviewer or if i need to swap before virtual loops next week.
also any other job hunt tools that were actually worth the cash. resume reviews, mock interview platforms, networking apps, idk. burning thru savings and want to spend on stuff that moves the needle, not random subscriptions that just feel productive.
thats it for now.
Plus, with so many fields now on the cusp of being taken over by AI, a decent UBI should definitely be on the table.
One thing I’ve noticed while job searching is that timing matters a lot. By the time a role shows up everywhere, hundreds of people have already applied, which decreases the chances by a lot.
Grep tools are usually the solution which checks company career pages directly and brings fresh software engineering, data, AI/ML, and internship roles into one place. If you are looking for something similar, DM or comment. I've something that might help someone if they are in a similar situation.
Didn't want it to look like a promotion. If interested, please dm or comment; I will paste it there. TY.
If you're a student in the US managing your college classes and this crazy job market at the same time, hang in there, more power to you!🫡
I was lucky to bag 3 intern offers as well as 3 full-time offers last year, all thanks to applying for 100s of roles a week. To find the right set of roles as soon as they dropped, I wrote a Python script to scan all Greenhouse job boards and catch them at scale. I'm sharing the live gsheet with 600+ open intern and new grad roles (SWE, AI, Quant/Finance, PM, Hardware), more than a 100 of these opened up just this week!
It updates daily so you have a clear target list every day! I plan on adding Workday and Ashby to the sheet soon too.
Having fresh job leads matters, and the three massive bottlenecks I figured out while going down the ATS rabbit hole:
1. Timing is everything. The data shows that roughly 80% of offers go to people who apply within the first 7 days of a listing.
2. Semantics matter way too much. I was applying for "AI Engineer" roles with "Machine Learning Engineer" on my resume. ATS parsers can be incredibly rigid. Literally just changing my past titles and headline to exactly match the target role had noticeably more callbacks.
3. Keyword stuffing backfires. Dumping keywords might get you past the initial ATS screen, but human recruiters will shoot it down with zero mercy. You have no choice but to actually embed exact phrases naturally into your bullet points.
Now doing all this'd mean barely 6 applications in an hour, worst part is this is entirely a waste of time. We're supposedly approaching AI and it's about time we automate this whole loop. I've built that ** automates all of the grunt work of a job hunt** and has already saved 9+ hours for 7 users. Sign up for the waitlist right away!
Happy to answer any questions in the comments about my experience, my findings on ATSes or my product in DMs/comments!
“You’re the only creature that pays to live on Earth.”
Me applying for jobs after practicing salary negotiations on InterviewMan so at least the suffering comes with a better paycheck
Honestly, this situation has turned into a somewhat strange chapter in my career.
At Company A, where I currently work, I was making 68k a year in my role. My raise was 5%, and honestly, I felt like I had been standing still for a while.
Company B offered me 78k a year for a job very similar to what I do now. I showed the offer to my current employer, and they countered with 86k a year.
About three weeks after that, I got an offer for 108k a year from another company, for a more technical project/engineering role, and I can say that this is a big step forward for my career growth.
The awkward part is that my current employer probably wouldn't have made a counteroffer to Company B if they didn't genuinely see my value and place in their organization. They also addressed the basic things I had brought up: clearer growth paths, better pay, and more flexibility to work from home. I appreciate that, and I don't think they acted badly at all.
But the offer from the third company feels too big to turn down.
I'm looking for advice on how to handle this without burning any bridges. The management team at my current employer are genuinely good people. They tried hard to keep me once I had an offer to leave, and in general they tried to do right by me and my career when they could.
I'm planning to bring this up with them at the end of this week. How can I make the situation less awkward, and make the next two weeks as comfortable as possible for both me and them?
Thanks
Edit: A few people asked how I managed to prepare for all these interviews while still working full-time. Honestly, mock interviews helped a lot. I practiced with a friend and sometimes use AI tools like InterviewMan to organize my answers and feel more confident before interviews.
Take them. But don’t tell the things you don’t like. If you don’t take them they count you as you’re not happy and if there’s layoffs you’ll be on the list
I was rejected for a promotion that, honestly, I felt should have been pretty straightforward. After the internal interviews, I found out that someone on the team with less experience and weaker people-management skills was offered the role instead of me.
I told them I was upset, and then the next morning I went on annual leave.
The CEO messaged me while I was away and said she'd like to talk to me about roles that might come up soon, or whether there's any training that could put me in a better position for the next step.
Since then, I've heard from a few managers that the person who got the job would probably have been at risk of redundancy if I had been promoted. Part of her current job has now been folded into the new role. So to me, it feels like the decision had been made before the interviews even happened. Apparently, there's another opening coming up that's three levels above me, but I'm not very confident it'll go in my favor.
I have a chat with the CEO at the end of this week, and I don't know what I should or shouldn't say.
I'm prepared to leave if nothing real comes out of the conversation, but my contract is also due to be renewed in about six weeks, so I don't want to go into the conversation angry or too aggressive.
At this point, I'd probably start preparing for outside opportunities too. I already have several offers lined up, and I’ll do some mock interviews with my friend. If needed, I’ll also use AI tools like InterviewMan to help me organize and structure my answers during interviews.
Would be great if you could share what you did differently that actually made the all important difference?
(...and congratulations on your new job!)
Actually both are kinda unstable