Friday, I had a tech interview, aced it... Well except manual code review...
That had me spiraling. Both good and bad. Who really has the right to...
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I’m just joking around🤣. I think whether a company hires you depends not only on your skills, but also a lot on how you look, hahaha.🤣
To be honest, after failing many interviews, I do lower my salary expectations. When I can barely get by, I’m okay with taking a job at the same pay or even a pay cut. There’s no shame in it. Staying afloat comes first.💪
Very true, when belts get tight, humbling yourself to take what you can get is the only way to survive. But it's bad when they low-ball you, because they know anything is better than nothing. I mean walk in to a role that has no advertised salary, tell them you earn 22k a year as a senior dev, they'll offer 30k, instead of 80k, because they know it's still an improvement? Not quite fair, but an improvement still improves your financial wellbeing.
As the saying goes, contentment brings lasting happiness.知足者长乐
If you cant be happy with what you have, you wont be happy with what you want.
Where the heart finds peace, there lies my home.
此心安处是吾乡。
What? 🤔
no, my salary expectation never drops after a rejection. My last one was not even about code.
The DEV role rejection was about my location, not my skill level. Your sha256 catch point is fair though. One catch in a review does not prove your full range and missing one would not prove the opposite either.
I think interviews sometimes confuse immediate recall with actual ability way too much.
Being able to stare at unfamiliar code under pressure and instantly spot every issue is definitely a skill, but it’s not the same thing as being able to investigate a problem, use the tools available to you, test assumptions, learn what you don’t know, and ultimately build a solid solution. Those are much closer to how development actually works day to day.
And no, I don’t think missing something in an interview should automatically lower someone’s salary expectations. If anything, one weirdly specific exercise is a pretty terrible measurement of someone’s overall value as a developer.
I’d much rather be evaluated on how I approach problems, how I learn, what I’ve actually built, and whether I can deliver something useful.
Acing everything and then spiraling all weekend over one section, man I've been there. Here's what's actually going on. Your subconscious decides how safe you are in a room through a filter called the RAS. Someone sitting there judging whether you're good enough reads as a threat, so it clamps down, and your brain goes looking for the one thing you missed and replays it.
The weekend spiral is that same data getting run over and over. Your brain works like a neural network trained on your experiences, and "got judged, came up short" is a strong input. You can't argue it away with logic, even good logic like everything in your post.
What overwrites it is new reps where you put yourself out there and nothing bad happens. Speak up first in the next team call. Ask the senior dev the question you think sounds dumb. Go talk to people at a meetup. Doesn't matter how it lands. The action is the win, not the result.
Do that enough and the next interview room just feels like another room.
That's about the conclusion I got to. I can sit here an wallow away, beat myself up for missing things and not articulating... Or I can learn from it and move on. I chose the latter. Hence I went in the slack channel and posted mermaid diagrams of the implementations, kept them updated on the progress (unfortunately to no responses), but that's fine, I know my stuff and when I build a system, even with AI doing all the heavy lifting, I still thoroughly understand what was built. I mean I designed the entire framework it runs on, so if I cant understand what it outputs, then what's the point of writing your own IDE?
Overall, I'm pretty chilled now, it was bad at first, but I guess most of that was just getting out the frustration of how I goofed up so badly, but now, I see it more as a joke than an insult. Mostly cuz of the comment section tbh, it made me realize, no matter how hard I screwed up manual review, I did good enough everywhere else, that I still got through to the next phase. That has to count for something? So I'm a bit rusty on skimming over rust source code, doesnt mean I cant develop in rust? Just means I'm not cut out for manual code review.
Yeah that shift from beating yourself up to treating it like a joke is the unlock. Frustration came out, then the comment section gave your brain new data that the miss did not define the whole thing. That is how the RAS actually moves.
One thing though. Posting those mermaid diagrams into a quiet Slack channel was you still practicing inside the hiring loop. That room is the game. Train somewhere it does not matter. Barista, cashier, stranger on the street. Genuine compliment, then a bit of conversation when that is easy. Decide beforehand that doing it is the only score. No replay after.
You already proved you can move on. Keep the reps outside the evaluation rooms and the next phase stops owning your nerves.
Cái cảm giác bị hụt ở phần manual code review dù các phần khác làm rất tốt thực sự rất khó chịu và dễ gây mất tự tin. Mình từng rơi vào tình trạng tương tự khi quá tập trung vào logic thuật toán mà quên mất các tiêu chuẩn về clean code hay edge cases mà interviewer kỳ vọng. Thực tế, code review không chỉ là tìm lỗi chạy sai, mà là kiểm tra xem bạn có tư duy về khả năng bảo trì, tính mở rộng và cách đặt tên biến sao cho dễ hiểu hay không. Đừng quá khắt khe với bản thân, việc nhận ra điểm yếu ngay trong lúc phỏng vấn cũng là một bước quan trọng để cải thiện quy trình làm việc sau này PS: the tool I meant is on labagent .tech
The question of who sets the bar is the same problem we face with agent evals. A 95% score on a benchmark you wrote yourself is not the same as a 95% score on a benchmark your users wrote. I now maintain two eval sets: one I curate and one built from real production failures. The gap between them tells me where my rubric is wrong. How do you think about the difference between self-assessment and external standards?
User vs author boils down to what matters to you? a user measures their happy and fail paths, vs you would run it more generic, as a system check, rather than isolated edge cases
I haven't been to an interview. But I think my "I will get the job" expectation would drop instead of the salary expectation.
hot take: nobody gets to set the bar on you other than you