DEV Community: Ruan

Technical interviews are broken. I built a tool that proves it.

Ruan — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 00:28:12 +0000

The rejection that changed my perspective

I failed an interview because I took too long to reverse a string. In another, because I was slow to marshal a JSON into a struct in Go. And in a third? Because I took too long to open my IDE — I needed to close some confidential stuff from the company I was working at.

Three rejections. None of them measured my actual ability to solve problems or ship software.

The pattern no one talks about

Most developers in a hiring process are already working at another company. They're used to that context's business rules — which means using a small subset of a programming language's features.

Even in long careers, you don't use everything. And what you don't use, you forget.

Then the interview comes: they ask you about hoisting, closures, or that pattern you saw 3 years ago. If you don't answer quickly, you're out.

This doesn't measure competence. It measures short-term memory.

The best developers aren't the ones who memorize the most

The best developers at your company are like the best players on your favorite team: the ones who deliver the most are the ones who want it the most, not the ones with the most certifications.

The most famous case? Max Howell, creator of Homebrew, was rejected by Google because he couldn't invert a binary tree during the interview.

If you search on X for "failed tech interview" or "interview rejection", you'll find thousands of similar stories.

The AI era changed the game

With artificial intelligence, anyone can access technical answers in seconds. What once required memorization now only requires knowing how to ask the right question.

InterviewCoder, created by Roy Lee and Neel Shanmugam, was the first tool to explore this — offering real-time "cheat sheets" during interviews. Fireship made a video about it that went viral.

If a $60 tool can pass interviews at the world's hardest companies, what does that say about the process?

I built my own tool

After seeing InterviewCoder, I thought: why not build my own? Learn from the process and not depend on a paid tool.

StealthBrowser was born: a browser invisible to screen sharing tools on macOS.

The first version was a WebView in an anonymous window. It worked — until I ran into CoderPad, which detected when you switched focus away from the page.

The solution came from macOS's NSPopover class. Since the popover doesn't take focus away from the main window, the interview page doesn't detect that you interacted with something else.

Now you can search anything on the internet, silently screenshot your screen, paste content, and ask any LLM for help — all invisible.

The result

Since launching StealthBrowser, users have reported receiving offers from companies that had previously rejected them.

Did they become computer geniuses? No. The hiring system is broken — and they just found a way to play by the same rules.

If an invisible tool can turn "average" candidates into "approved" ones, is the problem with the candidates or the process?

I already have my answer. Do you?

The tool I mentioned: stealthbrowser.app