I finished at 3am...

#ai #development #career #discuss

So I've been doing the Wasmer hiring tasks. As expected, they grossly underestimated the time required for the pgrust port... So why did it take me 8 days, but less than 4 hours?

To answer that question, you need to look at how I work. I built my own IDE, specifically because agentic orchestration made too many mistakes. So I fixed those mistakes, by building the infrastructure myself.

Now on to the fun part, it took me 2 hours of me-time to actually spec out the gameplan, find all the dependencies, chart it out into a roadmap and set up the team to do the task. Then it all boiled down to compile times.

I dont know if they'll hire me, but 7 PRs, 2 of which were production bug fixes. A fully working pgrust port published and tests and benchmarks to prove it. I dont know what more I could have done.

I finished the assignments and did the final submission at 3am today (10 hours ago), then went to bed. Woke up to my email being shared in the Slack channel and not a word since.

I honestly dont know what more I could have done. Yet I still feel it wasnt enough... And I think that comes down to the lack of ownership you feel with AI generated code. I signed off on everything, every edit was by my design, yet I just spent 4 hours reviewing, correcting, guiding, planning, never doing. So I guess it comes down to what do they value.

Top comments (9)

Christopher Jakob • Sep 29

Seven PRs, a working port, tests, benchmarks, submitted at 3am, and you still woke up feeling like it was not enough. So real. That is not you being dramatic. Your subconscious decides how safe you are through a filter called the RAS. Someone about to judge whether you are hireable reads as a threat, so it clamps even after you already did the hard part.

You cannot will that open by grinding another hour of review. Your brain is a neural network trained on every evaluation room you have been in. If a lot of those ended with silence or "not quite," that is the data it is running on. You do not argue with that. You overwrite it.

Get reps outside the hiring task. Genuine compliment to a stranger. When that is easy, compliment plus a bit of conversation. Then more. Does not matter how it goes. The action is the win, not the email that never came. Stack enough of those and the next silent Slack channel stops owning your nervous system.