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

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41–50 of 249 posts

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

#41
OP- it sounds like you are experiencing a high level of anxiety & depression. Speaking from similar experience, the world can look very bleak at times. And interviews can be very stressful.

Definitely counseling & medication can help. Please know that your worthiness is not defined by your job, or your position. Try to imagine yourself talking to a son/daughter and what you might say to them if they shared the same thoughts with you. sometimes we are hardest on ourselves.

Please listen to the other good advice in this thread.

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

#42

So the way you feel about interview puzzles is how most people feel about them. It's -stupidly- rare for people to 'figure out' the question in an interview; even those who appear to are just dredging it up from having seen it somewhere. A lot of those style questions are things that took someone weeks to figure out originally, and while we may be better equipped than they were, and so able to figure them out faster…

> It's -stupidly- rare for people to 'figure out' the question in an interview

...really? I've heard of people failing interviews at the Big4 because they solved the problem, but did it sub optimally.

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

#43
post #40
post #15

Hey, OP. Impostor syndrome sucks. Everyone has it. This industry is a bunch of nerds (and this part is not pejorative, I am one) who spent most of their lives being identified by how smart they were and they are culturally incentivized (and this one is pejorative, because tech culture is trash, but it's not your fault unless you perpetuate it, so don't!) to be desperate to win the approval of their peers by how bulgi…

are culturally incentivized (...) to be desperate to win the approval of their peers by how bulging their foreheads are While I largely agree with your main thrust, I must take issue with this. Many of us (older generation perhaps?) were culturally incentivized to not exhibit any of our nerdiness, and were ostracized or worse for doing so. Many of us developed a "dumber" external persona and explicitly avoided demons…

Even amongst your peers? In the inner circle? You don't have the urge to stomp-a-nerd that encroaches on your territory?

Maybe you don't personally, but I'm positive this sentiment exists from others in your generation.

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

#44

So the way you feel about interview puzzles is how most people feel about them. It's -stupidly- rare for people to 'figure out' the question in an interview; even those who appear to are just dredging it up from having seen it somewhere. A lot of those style questions are things that took someone weeks to figure out originally, and while we may be better equipped than they were, and so able to figure them out faster…

> It's -stupidly- rare for people to 'figure out' the question in an interview; even those who appear to are just dredging it up from having seen it somewhere.

Isn't the point of those questions more to evaluate your problem solving skills (coming from someone who has never been up against those questions), and not to determine if you can actually solve the problem, but how you're able to justify your answer?

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

#45
I was in a very similar position as you a while ago and was equally despondent. I thought I was a good engineer, I had a good track record and experience, lots of open source, etc but my interviews were a dice roll. I would either answer the question easily or fumble quite a bit and not get the offer. I would get extremely nervous during these high pressure interviews and the more I was rejected the more nervous I got.

My saving grace was finding a place that didn't haze the shit out of with whiteboard coding but gave me a very involved take home project solving stuff similar to their real world problems (I did do a timed online coding screen and some high level technical discussions as well). Obviously there are some downsides to doing a take home project in terms of the time investment, but see if you can find a more enlightened place that gives you this option. Maybe someone on HN knows of companies who are open to this.

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

#47
Just want to chime in and say you're not alone. I am miserable at Google and have found the biggest lie Google recruiters tell people is that internal transfers are easy. I got "exceeds expectations" and still find the transfer process to be mountains of red tape. And for as much as everyone makes it seem like you can walk into a new job, my few attempts at exploring have run into people getting hung up on "So why do you want to leave Google?" Bay Area is also terrifyingly expensive to be unemployed.

Ultimately, I know I won't go hungry and it's just a job/career. Doing my best to focus on things that make me happy outside of work. Tech is a stressful career and job searching sucks, so don't feel alone, just focus on the positives.

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

#48
post #28
post #9

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. Maybe what you most need is a divorce.

Wife could be part of the problem...what kind of spouse is not supportive.

I quit from a bad situation with support from my wife. Best thing I ever did and best thing she ever did for me.

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

#49
post #40
post #15

Hey, OP. Impostor syndrome sucks. Everyone has it. This industry is a bunch of nerds (and this part is not pejorative, I am one) who spent most of their lives being identified by how smart they were and they are culturally incentivized (and this one is pejorative, because tech culture is trash, but it's not your fault unless you perpetuate it, so don't!) to be desperate to win the approval of their peers by how bulgi…

are culturally incentivized (...) to be desperate to win the approval of their peers by how bulging their foreheads are While I largely agree with your main thrust, I must take issue with this. Many of us (older generation perhaps?) were culturally incentivized to not exhibit any of our nerdiness, and were ostracized or worse for doing so. Many of us developed a "dumber" external persona and explicitly avoided demons…

Amongst non-nerds, I totally agree; lots of people slow-play it (and so do I) in polite company. But nerd among nerds? This may be true for you specifically, but early in my career I regularly got stomped by the old heads for reasons that in retrospect really do seem like "this might be different and I don't know it therefore CHARGE!". And today I am often constrained to shave a graybeard when I go talk to a new prospective client or whatever when said graybeard wants to you-don't-know-Jack me.

Me, I'd think we would be better than moose, butting heads to prove our dominance, but...not always?

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

#50
Sounds like something that Carol Dweck's ideas (http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/dweck) could help with for you, when she talks about fixed mindset versus growth mindset. Right now, it seems like you are looking for present-tense validation from the external -- "I used to be intelligent... but now I'm dumb and worthless. [drawing evidence from criticism of pull requests and a failed interview, which are normal and perfectly natural challenges for someone starting out in their career]" Whereas a more effective way to try to frame your conceptions of yourself and human beings in general may be to take a future-tense inclusive view, where your current challenges are considered as opportunities for your future self to become more skilled and intelligent.

It's natural for intelligent, scientifically-minded individuals to tend towards a fixed mindset, where you create hypotheses about yourself, collect evidence based on your performance on objective measurements, and draw durable conclusions from that evidence. But while this may work for physical laws in physics or chemistry, human beings change and grow in response to stimuli -- so in fact that most intelligent version of yourself possible is the one that overcomes all your current challenges, instead of becoming discouraged by your current inability to overcome those challenges in the past.

There is no need to base your own consideration of your own worth as a human being from your ability to solve interview puzzles or submit code requests. Simply take a vow to yourself to forgive yourself for even your most painful failures. Do not view them as evidence against yourself, proving your adequacy or inadequacy -- instead try to come to view your failures and challenges as stepping stones towards a more skilled future version of yourself. And try to understand that when someone criticizes you, it is because they want to help you improve. That was and still is a difficult one for me.

About your social status -- people tend to take unconscious cues in how they think of someone from how that person views themselves. The goal is not to edit your actions until you have convinced them to like you. (See Bill Murray's character from Groundhog Day.) Instead, once you come to like yourself by finding ways you can be of service to others, and view yourself as part of a greater whole -- in the social scale of as a member of your community, as well as the time scale of past, present, and future you -- the friends and social invitations will come. (Dale Carnegie's book helps too.) To borrow an idea from calculus, try to care more about your dx than your x, and approaching the limit of the best self you can be.

:) I'm sure there will be a lot of other helpful advice given in this thread. If this particular line of thinking appeals to you like it did to me when I went through something similar to what you are going through, feel free to let me know as I have infinitely more links on this from that time in my life.

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