Ask HN: Failed interview, feeling unemployable and depressed – what do I do?

I'll fight hard for my ideas, but not at the cost of missing what other people have to say. I'm reasonably old (nearing 50), I've been coding professionally since before college, and have a reasonably good head on my shoulders.

But so do other people, and ignoring what they're saying, or dismissing it because I'm not saying it, is a lost opportunity. Even if that opportunity ends up cementing my owb belief. I owe it to them, and more selfishly, to myself, to consider the possibility I'm wrong.

(A verrrrrrry remote possibility, but ya' never know ;)

Seek validation outside of work. Collect that Big 4 paycheck and remember to enjoy the rest of the day. You are still living a better existence than perhaps 90% of this Earth.

It may helpful to consider that the current interview system is, literally, designed to make you fail.

That is to say: not with 100% certainty -- and on some level, they want at least some of the candidates to succeed, some of the time -- but on another level, it quite deliberately designed to (1) quickly segregated candidates into easily identifiable "badass 10xer" and "worthless poser" categories, and (2) do so with a high, if queasily acceptable false negative rate; along with an allegedly low false negative rate.

That is: it's known to be noisy in both directions; but it's generally considered to be OK -- and many people say this quite openly -- to flush out a whole lot of potentially good candidates if it minimizes the chances of passing a single bad candidate. So it's not that they want you to fail outright -- just that if you aren't clearly and immediately identifiable as their guy/gal, then they want you to "fail fast", as the saying goes, and to do so in a way that you can be easily labelled as a "failure" and a "washout".

Hence -- the whiteboarding sesions; the logic puzzles; the Fermi problems; the "no matter what answer I give they'l find a way to pick it it apart" style of questioning.

Point being -- yes it's a game; yes the rules have changed significantly in recent years; and yes, it's very much rigged, or more delicately put: cleverly optimized to save time and resources (including attention and emotional costs) on the hiring side, at the expense of the those same resources on the candidate's side.

My thoughts are descending into the darkest reaches. Death doesn't seem so bad anymore. Then I don't have to think about all this.

I don't know where I went wrong. I used to be intelligent. I used to be liked by my teams. I used to be good at puzzles.

Now I'm dumb and worthless.

I don't have the option to stop working for a while. I have the savings for it, but it's unacceptable to my wife.

I don't know what to do.

I'm very sorry to be hearing all of this. The good news is the current fad for puzzles and aggressive grilling session is, after all, just a fad. Not all hiring sessions are run this way; a great many aren't -- just keep rolling the dice, and eventually you'll get a fair shot, and find yourself sitting across from the table from someone who treats you like an equal and an intelligent human being from the get go. Rather than a secretly incompetent poser / washout / has-been / never-was waiting to be exposed.

Because it is after all just a game. And you only need the dice to turn up once for you to get out of the current rut you're in.