Our current slack integration is terrible with threaded conversations. However this was a good one and I didn’t want let it scroll off:
Anyone have advice for dealing with the self-loathing and imposter syndrome that comes after flubbing a job interview?
God I hate that feeling
I don’t think I’m actually looking for advice, just sympathy
Bob White
Yeah, I feel you.
This helps
If it helps, a lot of people I look up to in the industry flub their interviews when I’ve got them in
Yeah, I’ve conducted a lot of interviews and I know the interviewee is never at their best… but I do properly hate being on the other side of it
Oh yeah, its all my public speaking anxieties mixed with my having to meet new people anxieties
Generally speaking – if you come out of an interview feeling that way, somebody else probably did something wrong.
A lot of interviewers, unfortunately, treat it like some kind of talent show – “prove to me that you are worthy! impress me!” which is bullshit.There are jobs where all you need is curiosity and willingness to learn and jobs where you need some pretty precise technical background; jobs where it’s all about specialist knowledge and jobs where it’s all about temperament. If you got to the interview stage and both parties aren’t roughly aligned on what kind of job it is and whether you are a reasonable fit, the hiring person probably dropped the ball or is still spouting some nonsense about “rockstars”.
The really hard part is when your moments together just don’t go well: mis-communications, dropped cues, just lack of chemistry. Those are hard to feel good about – they are like bad dates. But, like bad dates, they are probably a blessing in disguise : if you’re not clicking well in a situation where everybody is on good behavior, you’re probably not going to enjoy working together.
The superficial problems often come from questions that turn it into a gameshow instead of a mating dance. Sometimes the interviewer really needs to know where you land on the spectrum from “clueless noob” to “expert” about a given subject. But if they have any brains at all they will let you know what they are trying to calibrate for, give you a sense of how much or little it matters, and not put you on the spot.I switched from doing math and code-style questions in the interview to doing them offline precisely because the candidates worried about them way more than I did . If I ask you to ID the difference between a () generator expression and a [] list comprehension, say, it’s because I’m trying to get a sense of where you fall on the python spectrum – not because I only hire people who know them both and can give me a paragraph on which one to use one. But all too often as you ramp up the tech or math questions you hit someone’s upper limit and they freak out, no matter how much you try to reassure them that you were literally just looking for where the upper limit was. It’s an inherently fraught circumstance and people ought to be aware of that – unfortunately, a lot of places still treat the whole thing like the !@$R^!^# spelling bee
.Being a mismatch for any given job should be no more damning than being a mismatch for a given shoe size.
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find sometimes it comes down to just letting people know the intent of questions too. Had one toss questions at me because he know they were about a topic that i do not know about. Kinda freaked out about it. But if they communicated up front why they did that it would have been less stressful.
since the intent and what they were after was just wanting to hear my workflow and thought process for solving a completely unknown problem
While ALL of that is completely true, in my case I hit this iceberg with plenty of warning. I panicked a little on one question (whose answer should have been “I don’t know how to answer that, can you tell me me more”), realized I was panicking, called attention to the panic, and then the panic and my reaction to it became all I could think about. I never really recovered, and God knows what I was saying while my brain was processing all of that in the background.Still, it’s all instructive, and if I’m willing to accept it and learn from it, it’s a great lesson. I just want to stop feeling like I’m going to die of cringe.
Panic feedback loops are a thing I’m very familiar with
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always that fear of, “do i still remember how to speak english” right before opening your mouth
Definitely did the same thing in an interview a few months ago. Made me a nervous wreck for hours after. While it was all I could focus on, I think the interviewers knew it was more about missed communication and I ended up getting that job.
my go to tactic has always been to be too nervous to sleep the night before and get through the whole thing with caffeine and adrenaline
Yeah, the fear-of-falling thing is pretty nightmarish if it hits out out of the blue. The usual algorithm is:
- “Let me get this straight before I answer, you’re saying…?”
- (based on answer) “So. I haven’t had to do this before, but I think if that’s the problem, I’d want to know …” This part is not just buying time: a lot of interviewers really want to see what questions you ask, since that is a good index of your ability to deal with the unknown – a totally normal TA thing.
- If the questions go well, the back and forth around that can help you orient – the discovery process for a workflow Q will be different than the one for a graphics algorithm and or for a hard data management problem. A lot of times the answers to the followup Q’s are strong hints about a good answer.
- If you’re really at sea, it’s best to just say “dang, never had to do this one. It sounds like a fun problem, but I’d have to educate myself on it to really solve it well. Reminds me of a time when …” and talk about being at sea without a liferaft before and how you self-helped your way to shore.
All that said, nobody likes getting caught flat footed. It just kinda sucks, but it happens to all of us once in a while. One of those things.
Sorry to hear that man, my go to method is to get comfort food after the fact (lots, yeah I resemble pandas I eat a lot) and watch my favorite show but for the most part, think of it like this, there’s tons of things out there that anyone can not know, especially in an industry that’s packed with autodidacts, I did an entire circling back from tech to art to tech to tech to tech. I was never in class for programming and nobody ever taught me a word of Python.The important thing is to realize that it could’ve happened to anybody, and that we all kick ourselves pretty much the same way when we don’t perform as well as we know we can, just remember that everyone here faces problems that they have to search the answers for every single day, our jobs as technical folks is to seek out answers, if we thought we knew how to do everything I doubt we would’ve picked this line of work and we would’ve just became talk show hosts.