Will be blunt since I imagine you're fed up and don't want affirmations.
In the most common case where I see engineers who say they struggle with the soft skills parts of interviewing, the underlying issue is a lack of skill in communication - working out what's important, stating it clearly and concisely, and in a way appropriate to the audience. I read some of your blog and found it pleasantly chatty, well structured, and obviously technical. If you communicate like you do in writing, there is obviously no problem there. I have no doubt that your account of performing well on technical questions is correct. However...
After some quick google searches, what I did find in your digital footprint is:
- A relatively high number of online posts complaining about employers in general across several years
- A tweet from a few years ago where you say you're fed up of software engineering but are forced to stick with it
- (as you stated) a jumpy work history
My best guess is that you're failing the digital footprint check. If I was hiring and post interview was doing a little more digging on candidates to help do a final pick, I would look at the short tenures, the outwardly directed frustration at employers, the stated lack of desire to be a software engineer at all, and pass on you.
As for why this is happening after several technical interviews? Most likely that's when you undergo final background checks and get cut out of the process. If you are burned out, sick of workplace social narratives, and don't want to work as a software engineer, I sincerely empathise for you. However: don't let me, a random hacker news commenter, find that out in under 2 minutes of time spent on Google.
I actually do appreciate the advice and blunt feedback, because you're right, I'm a little tired of affirmations. I honestly forgot about the tweets from years ago where I was pretty burnt out. I will be deleting those shortly.
I agree that's what it should be, but that absolutely not what it is and it hasn't been that way for many years. People treat LinkedIn like Facebook and post their opinions on things.
Most of the potentially worrisome stuff I've posted has been comments responding to other peoples' posts. I went and deleted nearly all of those, though.
Really appreciate seeing comments like this on HN. You got me thinking about my own presence online. I decided to use gpt-5-thinking and perplexity's deep research with the same prompt to deep dive on my legal name, find aliases, research those aliases, etc. Then report on positive and negatives findings. Both did a good job and helped me feel a bit at ease. They both noticed that I worked at a place that later had a controversy and knew that I left prior to that but gave actionable ideas on how to answer questions around that during interviews or via linkedin. I think I might set up a perplexity task to run and email this once a month.
I'll probably one seperate ones for my own handles that are not attached to my name to monitor them as well. The panopticon never sleeps.
Yeah honestly it really is something I hadn't considered much, especially my old Twitter which I haven't logged into for years and the last posts were when I was in an extremely bad state mentally. I completely forgot about it even existing, but of course whether or not I remembered it doesn't mean it won't potentially hurt my prospects.
It's impossible to know how many jobs I've been turned down for due to my online presence and edgy takes; most of my takes really aren't that edgy or even that out there, but they might be enough make a potential employer think twice.
I just deleted my old Twitter, my Reddit account, and most of my posts on LinkedIn. I don't think any of them were really that bad but I don't really need them haunting me for forever.
i’m using perplexity pro set to deep research with this prompt:
read the hackernews comments on this link to understand how someone's digital footprint might affect their ability to get hired. Then do that research against me, <first last>, to help me understand what is available about me out there that could help or harm my ability to compete. See if there are any internet handles that you can associate with me, if so, research them too.
Because of these "digital footprint checks" now nobody can truly say what they want online. Either you have to put on a fake persona or just go completely silent. It’s self-censorship in disguise. Dead Internet Theory confirmed.
I mean, I dunno. I attached my name to these things because these are opinions I do really hold. I could have easily done this under a pseudonym, but I didn't, and if I am going to attach my name to it (or an alias easily tied to m), then I can't really get upset that people associate these opinions to me.
Some of these opinions are ones I don't really hold anymore so deleting isn't a big deal. I will admit that some of the ones I am deleting upset me because I still do think that way.
This kind of response shows humility and self-awareness. I have no doubt you'll do great after a tidy up. Not an empty affirmation. Good luck stranger.
I was declined from a job recently specifically because I wrote a blog post about my history with depression and medication for it [1]. That's not me justifying after the fact, they actually told me this.
I took down most of the posts on my blog that were personal as a result. Most of the stuff on there now is just technical stuff that I'm not too worried about being attached to my name.
[1] To be clear, the blog post was only talking about prescribed medication, I've never done any illegal drugs and I've never been an alcoholic, I'm not speaking in code for "self medicating".
This company doesn't have fifteen employees so I don't think I'd have much recourse regardless, but it was over the phone and it wasn't recorded. It would be my word against theirs. I did end up reporting them to the NYC Department of Labor, though.
Of course, they were just the ones stupid enough to be honest about it. I have no idea how many jobs I've been declined for where they just gave me a generic form letter.
A good reason to have an anonymous account to post negative things on. Never post honest negativity under your real name. Unless you work for yourself or your vulnerability is a sort of marketing, you're only hurting yourself. Make an anon account, vent as much as you want.
If I'm hiring someone, I want to like working with them, and if I find them ranting online, I just mark them as negative and pessimistic. I can't help it - that's human nature
> If I'm hiring someone, I want to like working with them, and if I find them ranting online, I just mark them as negative and pessimistic. I can't help it - that's human nature
I understand this, but we can agree that this kind of sucks, doesn't it? Everyone has bad days where they're frustrated about something and could write something a bit cynical in the process. I don't think that's reflective of their entire personality. From Ted Lasso:
> I hope that either all of us or none of us are judged by the actions of our weakest moments… but rather by the strength we show when, and if we’re ever given a second chance
Dunno, obviously you don't want someone who's a downer all the time, but I feel like the permanence of the internet can skew perspectives.
Sure, but when I've spent 30 mins talking to you and you look the same on paper as the other 5 competent candidates and I need to make a choice on who to hire, any data point that portrays you negatively is an easy way to narrow my decision.
Outside of some jobs requiring LinkedIn, I've never actually heard of anyone being declined for not having social media.
I haven't had a Facebook account since 2015, I don't have an Instagram and I hadn't updated my Twitter for years until I deleted it (about two hours ago). As far as I'm aware, a lack of social media presence hasn't been a factor.
> I've never actually heard of anyone being declined for not having social media
In late June 2025, the US announced that for inbound students from abroad it will be screening socials, and lack of an unlocked social footprint may be a disqualifier.
This brings the gov in line with private industry, as employers that do actual background checks (as opposed to, say, credit checks) are shown flags if socials are all locked or none exist.
This matters most in industries which are required by their regulators to do and/or maintain backgrounds.
I'm not sure why that would be suspicious. If I were planning nefarious stuff, it's not like it would be hard for me to make have a social media presence to fly under the radar.
I always say I am the type of person who would post too often so instead of having social media I just read non-fiction books.
So far no one has held being well read against me.
Often, it flips to a book recommendation actually. At that point good luck with your social media when I pick a book that fits perfectly in with the marketing of myself getting the job, create a whole interesting conversation in that direction, while they read some inane nonsense from the social media poster.
Don't change who you are for an interview. It will just result in a job where you aren't happy being a different version of yourself. I know it is frustrating to not find work, but finding work that isn't right for you brings whole new levels of frustration later.
And, as others have said... this rejection might have nothing to do with you. If they had 1000 applications, and you were their choice above 998 of them, you still get the rejection because they hired the person who was above 999 of them.
100% untrue. Hiring is a social game. You want to put your best foot forward, and then slowly let out your truer self over time. Much like dating - you don't want to air all your dirty laundry on the first date. Don't lie about who you are but at the same time people are more tolerant of your quirks once they get to know you better
I actually more or less did air all my dirty laundry on my first date with my wife, and we've been together since 2013, so at least that worked out ok.
Still overall I think I agree with you. I think most techy people tend to like me if they talk to me for awhile, but I can be kind of abrasive with initial impressions.
I'm just psychoanalyzing myself at this point; overall good advice...thanks!
While I completely agree with hiding who you are for work, I code switch for work with the best of them. I am a customer facing consultant in rooms with decision makers, I aired all of my dirty laundry with my now wife because I didn’t want to waste my time or hers.
We had been working together for two years. But not in the same department. I just started talking to her one day in the parking lot and she finally said “are you going to stop staring at me and ask for my number”.
I was not thinking about dating at the time. I had just come out of a bad situation less than a year earlier and I was trying to get my financial house in order - it was 2011 and I had made some bad real estate decisions before the housing crash and I was trying to get my career on track.
I was happy with just hanging out with my long term female friends at the time and they provided all of the emotional and companionship needs I had with no complications. My friends and I traveled together, went out on “dates” (do you call it that when you are just doing date like things with no emotional or physical expectations?) etc.
When I told my now wife all I was going through it didn’t scare her away. She was just as up front with me. We were married seven months later. 15 years in, I still don’t feel like she kept anything from me that I didn’t know about her during the first two weeks and vice versa.
This though is horrible general advice as far as dating. I wasn’t pursuing her. We knew of each other from work so I wasn’t a complete stranger and we were both in our mid 30s and divorced then and she had two boys.
I wasn’t in the headspace to seriously be in the “dating scene” then.
I know how to small talk now and have studied conversational skills for my career. If I were out there now, I would do things differently.
For those wondering if you are privileged enough to willingly make yourself ineligible for some jobs that your qualified for like the above poster is:
This has never been my experience. Quirkyness in the interview loops have never dictated my on the job experience. And having been pulled in to conduct interviews, I can say that its all so last minute and unplanned, that it reinforces how little it matters. Judge a company all you want, just get the offer first.
You’ll probably never talk with the hiring manager or that recruiter again. You’ll probably be working with a different PM and engineers.
I've rounded lots of sharp edges off my personality over the years, having been rejected a lot and having made unforced errors.
The problem with advice here is that, if you're right and there's something personality-related and it's not just fierce competition or tiny sample size, we can't really tell through a post. I'm talking about the je ne sais quoi of you, the body language, the attitude, the unwritten vibe you give off, and posting videos here is uh, well, yeah, unlikely.
So, I'd echo the advice of others to talk to your friends and ask them to give you feedback. Hopefully they're observant and willing to be blunt.
I'll opine, though - have you tried a little masking and humility? I ask because if I had to guess based on probability, the archetype of the highly intelligent, technically excellent nerd tends to also run adjacent to underdeveloped social skills, or at least indifference to using them. Arrogance, defensiveness, ego abound. That's what I coach my team and friends on who have cracked this type of discussion open.
If you were going to mask for an interview, coming across humble/hungry/smart (smart is probably not a problem for most here, but humble?...). Consider mirroring with the interviewer. Stay detached and practice this, especially when a finger is pointed at you or you don't ace a question, or they disagree.
In all, it's probably the stuff you can't describe easily without being next to you. You may not even realize the signals you're putting off, if that is even what's going on.
I know the struggle - my wife has been turned down over and over and over, and she takes it personally, but she's also going for jobs that clearly have tons of great applicants. Is it her attitude? Did she make a mistake bringing up that experience? Or maybe...or maybe it's just out of our control, and we have to stick to the plan and stay in the market. The losing move is not to play.
In my normal personal life I tend to be pretty sarcastic and self-deprecating. My therapist says it might be a defense mechanism to avoid actually confronting problems; if you make a person you're talking to laugh then they usually think everything is fine and stop worrying about you.
I try not to do that during interviews. I don't think I'm coming off like I'm trying hard to be smart or brag, but it's very possible and likely that some level of my normal insecurities are bleeding through, and that happening even subtly might be enough to poison it for me.
That's definitely a tough one. In an interview you are literally selling yourself. You don't want to be off-putting with outsized arrogance, but you also don't want to be so humble that people question your actual skill level.
The rejection might also be random and out of your control. E.g. if they already filled the position or the higher-ups decided to save costs by taking back open headcount. Frustrating for sure, but not actionable.
From my POV, if you don’t have any strong signals about why you were rejected, I would just move on rather than trying to infer the reason.
Had to scroll too far down the page for this response. I wouldn't try to guess the reason why any particular company rejected you. 1. They usually aren't going to tell you why. 2. If they do, it's not necessarily going to be the real reason. There are so many internal reasons for not choosing to move forward with a candidate that have nothing to do with the candidate or their interview performance. The company's internal priorities and projects might have suddenly shifted. The headcount may no longer exist anymore. The hiring manager may have decided they really don't need another person after all. The job might not have existed in the first place and they're just fishing. The job might exist but they already know who they want and are doing throwaway interviews as a formality or for legal compliance reasons. Or they're just randomly rejecting candidates because they don't want to hire someone who is unlucky. No way to know for sure.
This isn't 2021 anymore. You need to recalibrate your world view.
There are probably 300 people interviewing for the job you interviewed for. So they need to not just pick someone who checks the boxes, but the BEST of all the people who checked the boxes.
Assuming you checked all the boxes, you weren't the best and someone else was chosen. That's all it is. What makes them the best? Who knows. There's likely 50 of them they had to choose from.
Job hunting has always been a numbers game but now it's worse by a factor of 100x. Don't take it personally, and keep going.
Yeah, at some level I know this; I've given interviews before and seen people get declined for the dumbest reasons, or no reason at all, and I usually give people this same advice when they're down.
Dunno, it's just hard not to take this a bit personally sometimes. As I said, if I felt like I knew what I was screwing up, then that would be something I could work on. It's not hard to buy textbooks and learn more about concurrency theory or distributed systems or something, or to build a project on my server to play with a library, or something like that. It's extremely hard to solve a problem if you have no idea what the problem even is.
You're not wrong with anything you said though. I just need to keep applying and go from there.
If you don't keep a stiff upper lip and be emotionally and mentally resilient about this, then someone who is exactly like you but has the resilience to keep going on will take your job.
This is the worst job market I've seen since the dot com bust. It's much worse than the Financial Crisis. There are tens of thousands of out of work programmers, and in the next few years more and more new grads are joining the mix. You have to understand who your competition is. There is also the existential crisis of AI taking our jobs as well hanging over us. It's pretty rough out there. That said, during the dotcom bust is when we first saw offshoring to India and people were worried to death that all the jobs were going to go to India and for the most part they didn't, there was still a competitive advantage to continue hiring in the US for the next 20 years.
The only way to get a job right now is either through connections from a friend or coworker that thinks you're great, or by hustling and applying to thousands of jobs, or by forming your own company.
Everything you know about finding a job, increase things by 100x. If last time you sent out 20 resumes and got a job, this time send out 2000 resumes. I'm not joking.
It's going to be tough, but if you're resilient, you will find a job. If you're worried about money, move your spending down to as close to 0 as possible. Move in with friends or family, eat ramen, and keep applying. You can do it!
That's not saying much. While there was a month or two early on where it was a bit touch and go, granted, all-in-all the Financial Crisis period was one of the best times ever to be a programmer. That was the App Store gold rush era and all the investment dollars running away from every other industry due to financial crisis concerns was funnelling into tech.
Oh I know, I will keep applying and hoping for the best, obviously. I don't really have the privilege of being able to give up, as I need to pay my mortgage.
It's just a bit discouraging sometimes. I don't really think I'd be a worse engineer than most people they end up hiring, so it's hard to not take this personally sometimes.
99% of the time, when I'm rejected I just roll my eyes and move on, but every now and then (and it appears to be kind of stochastic), one rejection will just get a bit more under my skin than others. I've been rejected for thousands of jobs and I don't have a crisis for each one.
> or to build a project on my server to play with a library, or something like that.
If you are up for playing, why not play with sales and marketing? Playing isn't limited to tech. Grab a pencil from your drawer and try to get someone to buy it. Just like with those little low stakes tech projects, as you keep prodding at it to get it to work, you are bound to learn something.
And if you truly have nothing left to learn about sales and marketing, well, then you will have at least learned that the problem you have isn't what you are currently suspecting.
This isn't really true. There are 300 people that might apply but only a few that ever get interviewed. If they are interviewing 300 people then the company doesn't even know what it wants.
The problem is that it doesn’t matter if you are one of the 300 that are most qualified, your resume may not even viewed or your application may not be seen. LinkedIn shows you both for Easy Apply.
In my niche, I was objectively one of the most qualified in the industry. But I heard crickets last year and the year before when randomly submitting my application to ATS’s.
Don’t cry for me. That was my “Plan C”. Plan A of using my network landed me two full time offers and one contract and my plan B of personal outreach to companies looking for my specific skillset led to two interviews and one offer all in less than a month.
Last year, I just answered one recruiter’s outreach and had an interview and offer that was a perfect fit within two weeks.
Let me say first I understand the frustration you must be feeling right now. It's no fun to be under the gun with bills to pay and think you're getting turned down from jobs because of something that isn't even really the core of the work (at least that's my assumption).
You don't have to be 100% sure about what it is personality-wise that you need to tune up to start making changes. You're an intelligent agent; your intuition is much better than random about things like this. I would say act on your intuitions about what specifically you are going that is rubbing them the wrong way, and be less like that - regress a little to the mean, in other words. This is generally good advice in the business world, even if it isn't good advice for e.g. becoming a celebrity on Twitter.
Take note that most psychological studies suggest that personality is very unlikely to change dramatically in adulthood no matter what you do. It's better to focus on techniques that let you chill out for a few hours/days/weeks than it is to try to actually change who you are at core.
I was well into my early 40s when I wound up working with someone who had most of my own personality quirks tuned up to 11. It was the most eye opening experience of my career and allowed me to see, observe and truly understand a lot of the advice I'd been given throughout my life.
Deep introspection is really hard. Assuming it is you that is the problem, and working from that assumption is anything but natural for most people. Even in your own thoughts. Arrogance, defensiveness and a skewed sense of self are things most people tend to carry with them.
I've read, listened to (audio book) and otherwise experienced a lot of leadership training in my life. A lot of it didn't really click until I was at a point where I could really self reflect, and literally seeing my own flaws in another person changed me significantly.
So I like to use this metaphor (it was originally for dating but applies here too).
Think of your body. Specifically how tall you are. You can't easily change your height. However, you can do the following:
- workout
- wear clothes that fit you and flatter your particular body type
- etc
The same applies to interviews.
e.g. if you are a quiet, introverted person then there probably isn't much you can do if you are interviewing for a job that requires an outgoing personality like sales or event planning
However, you can get better at rapport, asking questions and seeming interested and excited in the role. A lot of this is also how you respond to questions. For example, if someone asks "Tell me about X", X can be either vague or you are not sure why they are asking. If you respond with "Well, I have a couple examples of X here they are: A, B, C. Which one would you like to hear about?" then that shows you are both experienced and also good at clarifying what is being asked.
One EXCELLENT way to practice this is to reach out to friends or family members who have done a lot of interviewing and have them do a mock interview. This is useful b/c they know both:
- what hiring managers are looking for in general
- you as a person and what may be "the best side of you" vs "pretending to be something you're not"
I will also repeat what some other commenters have said:
You are interviewing them as much as they are interviewing you. Much like a marriage, you want to partner with someone that "fits" with you and vice versa. In other words,
> e.g. if you are a quiet, introverted person then there probably isn't much you can do if you are interviewing for a job that requires an outgoing personality like sales or event planning
Learning how to talk to people, read a room, small talk, etc can be learned. I’m definitely an introvert by nature. But people in a professional setting are really not that much different than computer systems. Once you understand different type of personalities, you learn what input gets you what output.
The Career Tools/Manager Tools podcasts has dozens of podcasts about dealing with people with different DISC profiles.
One secret I use when starting a conversation with someone new is “what keeps you busy?” and act interested and ask open ended follow up questions.
Speaking from my experiences in dozens of debriefs: I don't think I can recall a case where an otherwise good candidate was rejected for something like not liking someone's personality.
There might be a middle ground between "technical skills" and "personality", though, which we do take into account, falling under "soft skills", which may be affected by certain personality traits. Things like polling the interviewer for their thoughts, asking thoughtful questions, being curious about the source of disagreement or misunderstanding, not being dogmatic, and so on. I think it can be harder to demonstrate these kinds of skills with certain personality types -- I used to be very nervous in interviews, and it wasn't always easy to have the presence of mind to exercise these soft skills.
But even still, at least in technical interviews like programming or system design (as opposed to cross-functional/manager/tech leadership interviews), I've found it relatively rare for a candidate to be rejected for 'soft skill' failures when the right signals are there for technical strength.
I just think it has to be soft skills in a few particular cases; I always check my work after the interview to see if I got the questions right, almost always by writing a PlusCal spec and checking against the invariants that they specified. Sometimes my answer is wrong and doesn't satisfy the invariant and there's edge cases that I didn't consider, and when that's the case I'm not really surprised when I'm rejected.
But when I get the technical questions correct and TLA+ seems to agree with me, that's where I get really confused. I'm not typically interviewing for management positions, I'm interviewing for engineering jobs.
I would counter, in that depending on the position(s) and candidate pool soft skills will make all the difference in the world when choosing between two technically sufficient candidates. It may not even be a conscious bias, so much as, "I'd rather work with this person."
Most technical jobs can be done by most sufficiently skilled, or motivated candidates with enough intellect to handle the work. Not always to a certain level of craft, efficiency or trend setting, but it's not about that to most business stakeholders. I say this as someone who deeply cares about the craft, despite a rather insulting depiction, including some of my opinions and age I came across earlier today (grugbrain.dev).
Likeability is hard, and even then striking a balance in a given context is also hard. It often comes down to a level of self-reflection, which is where I think TFA is at right now. Which is an attempt to establish a balance of personal responsibility, with "culture fit." Given that many of us have personality traits that tend to be deviations from the norm in many ways, it's all that more important to understand that in ourselves and our efforts to adapt to society.
A pinnacle of this in Television is the show Dexter, where he regularly brings in doughnuts. I've had coworkers that did similar, and it's impressive the amount of affect this has on the working environment and relationships in turn.
Beyond this, comes the counter-intuitive position of being far more skilled than an interviewer. This can definitely work against you at times as well for a number of reasons. Just because you are the most technically adept for a position, doesn't mean you get the position. The technical aspects of most jobs are more about a minimum of, can they do the job. Not, are they the best fit.
> Beyond this, comes the counter-intuitive position of being far more skilled than an interviewer. This can definitely work against you at times as well for a number of reasons. Just because you are the most technically adept for a position, doesn't mean you get the position. The technical aspects of most jobs are more about a minimum of, can they do the job. Not, are they the best fit.
This has been happening to me a bit, at an increasing frequency lately
I don't want to come off as cocky, but I think I have a decent understanding of concurrency and distributed systems, and I think a lot of interviewers simply do not. Sometimes I'm "corrected" on my whiteboard examples, and I have to push back because I'm not actually wrong about something.
And that kind of makes me seem like a douchebag, but at the same time I'm not going to pretend that I'm wrong on something if I don't genuinely think I might be wrong.
At its core is better "selling skills" In my last job I noticed how much better people that did jobs like waitressing before were more likeable by Clients. Small things like saying at the end "John thanks for your time..." Put the name first, people like that. But in the end you might have done well and failed you on salary requirements...
I used to be a lecturer and I did notice that that really helped my public speaking; I tend to talk really fast and being a lecturer forced me to learn how to speak slower, so it wouldn't surprise me that being a waiter or waitress would be helpful for this stuff.
I've always found it very irritating when I felt people were trying to force saying my name in a conversation, but I think you're probably right and I'm just a weird case.
Salary requirements are a valid point; in this most recent example my salary requirements were smack in the middle of the listed range so I don't think it was an issue for this particular one but it's possible that they feel I'm too expensive.
Sorry for being slightly off topic (though true to the topic in explicit: personality tuning before an interview).
I don't have much experience with interviews and never got a job you had to interview for (hopefully will at some point). So don't take it as a gospel.
4 out of 5 interviews I've ever had went fantastic. I stressed a lot before the interview (kind of anxious personality) and had a long (20min) meditation before. Very often, for some time after meditating, I get much less anxious, much more confident and humble.
That 1 of 5 interviews that was a trainwreck - well, I didn't meditate before it. I also didn't do a mock interview with ChatGPT right before it, and believe that lack of warmup did me in. Literally, the first thing I was to say that day was an answer to an interviewers question about myself. I got stuck, realized it's going really bad, got even more stressed and didn't answer a single question in a composed manner.
You have no idea what you even did wrong. What you need to do is call up your friends and have them mock interview you, there's even free platforms and exchanges where you can do that. Get some actual feedback, don't act on wild conjectures.
Also keep in mind it could be as simple as that they had a better candidate.
The issue is not just this one company. I have been at this for months with similar stories for a lot of them.
Sometimes I get the technical questions wrong, so that's fair enough, I understand why they'd decline me for that and as I said that's something that I can at least work on for myself by reading through textbooks and/or building sample projects to understand a concept a bit better.
A lot of the time, though, I won't get the technical questions wrong, and it's this recurring thing of "I really don't know why I'm constantly being declined".
I wouldn't focus on trying to tune your personality as that's not really sustainable. What if you get the job, are you going to continue living a second personality during working hours?
You'll never know the real reason you weren't hired anyway, so it doesn't make sense trying to focus on changing something that you don't know is a problem to begin with. You're assuming it is personality, but it could also be other things related or not to you.
Interviewing is ultimately a numbers game; you can get better at it (with the myriad interview-prep materiel out there), but you are still subject to various uncontrollable factors. The most significant thing you can do is apply to more jobs, and thus increase your odds of getting hired.
Is there someone you trust who has been a mentor to you at one of your past jobs? Send them a note and ask them to mock interview you. People love being asked favors and for their opinion.
You sound unsure and defeated in your post. Were you feeling confident the day of the interview, or do you think you seemed desperate for the job?
I will say that all the best technical interviews I have had are ones where I spoke in short sentences, was able to end on a point rather than rambling, and left plenty of time in my answers to ask questions of the reviewer and demonstrate curiosity.
I feel defeated now primarily because I really thought that I was going to get an offer on this job, so it kind of felt like a punch in the stomach when I got rejected this morning.
I think I was feeling confident enough during the interview, but it's entirely possible that some of my cynicism bled through in my intonations in the Zoom call.
I do tend to be long winded when I speak, so maybe that is working against me. I'll actually take that in mind.
Speaking as someone who has done a lot of interviewing of candidates - being long winded or an otherwise poor communicator is one of the most common reasons to reject someone.
It's definitely worth practicing to be concise and clear in your responses (and don't waffle on - something I'm guilty of). Learn when to stop talking too.
It's just tough for me, because I kind of take pride in being accurate and technical questions often have a lot of edge cases and caveats that I feel compelled to point out because I don't want to say inaccurate stuff.
But of course that can go onto infinity; at some point you need to summarize and accept you can't be 100% accurate. I guess I need to figure out how to strike a balance between "blathering on" and "hand-waving away details". I have no idea how to do that but that might be a good thing to get out of mock interviews.
You can just refer to the edge cases or caveats (so it's clear you are aware of them) and let the interviewer follow up on them if they want to. This makes the interview a bit more conversational and helps build rapport with the interviewer.
That's generally what I do, I bring things up just to handwave them away and acknowledge that they're there.
The problem is, of course, that even handwaving things away, there's still a near-infinite number of potential caveats for any given subject, and I always feel a compulsion to list all of them. I did bother a friend of mine last night in order to get him to tell me how much of my rambling is tolerable so hopefully I have a better handle on it now.
There could be a lot of reasons why they may have passed, and it could have absolutely nothing to do with you or your personality.
If it was just one company, I wouldn’t start trying to change who you are. If you make up a new personality for the interview and get the job, then what? How long can you keep the character going? Do you want to work with people you can’t be yourself around?
In terms of what to possibly change, that’s almost impossible to say without seeing what you’re like in an interview.
It's natural to feel this way. But the thing that you have to remember about interviews like this where you're doing multiple rounds is that a lot of times they'll have people come to a round table discussion. If one person says something negative, that can often change the course of whether or not you're going to get the job. It depends on how much influence that person typically has. A lot of times people might defer to that person,etc.
I recently started a new job (big upgrade from my last gig), and after onboarding, one of my interviewers told me that a major factor in him recommending me for hiring is that I "looked bored and ready to move on" during the technical interview. I'm not sure if trying to look bored is a winning strategy in general, but there is my personal anecdote.
This sounds incredibly autistic. You assume the failure is something about your personality for absolutely no reason. Second, you assume lying about your personality during an interview will get you a job or keep you employed.
I have an autistic child who goes through this. They have absolutely no idea why they could be annoying and just assume they are otherwise awesome.
I am not sure that abysmally low social intelligence due to neurodivergence can be fixed. But, you can improve your capacity for nonverbal listening and ask for feedback.
I didn’t say I wanted to lie about my personality. I said I wanted to tune my personality so that I do better in interviews. It’s subtly different; I wanted advice on putting my best foot forward, and I was wondering if people had ideas for doing so.
It’s not just about this one job, obviously it’s impossible to know what a single employer’s reasoning is for this stuff; I have just noticed a pattern of me being pretty bad at interviews, and being declined enough to where I probably need to make some kind of change. I am not asking for one simple hack to make friends, it’s fucking interview prep. I don’t think I have low social intelligence in most cases, I have never had much issue making friends or anything like that. I don’t dispute that I am probably annoying and I don’t think I am awesome.
It’s not like interviews are anything like actual human interaction in any meaningful sense, and clearly a lot of people must agree because there are dozens of specific “interview prep” services out there.
Employment is all about being a good fit for the employer, not about being a good developer. I am often not selected because I preference things that scares the shit out of most developers even if such things are hugely beneficial.
Interviews are just talking to people. Its not the same as a casual conversation, but its also not a hostile police interrogation. Nonetheless, its still just a conversation. If you imagine it to be something different then something different it becomes.
There's no tricks, some people just won't like you unfortunately. If you are doing your best to be friendly and helpful, those people can F off basically. Many people get off on the power trip of you being in weaker position, and show their true colors as well. Just move on, though I know everyone needs a job.
Sometimes, being declined based on personality is a good thing. Unless you are too confrontational or burnt out, in my experience, places that reject technically competent people based on the perceived lack of soft skills tend to be a mess, dominated by corridor politics and shenanigans.
There's also the fact that you may only have a position or two open and literally hundreds of candidates who are more than minimally qualified to do the job.
On topic: this job market is a complete circus and I wouldn't gleam any rejections as it having anything to do with any factor you can control. So many jobs just disappeared for me mid-interview, with a few ending up as ghosts after 4-5 rounds. There's interviews where I do well but it's clear they had someone else in the pipeline with double my experience. Recruiter disrespect is also at very high levels and you'll be rejected for reasons they cannot legally disclose. Then there's the whole outsourcing issue and how the interview never intended to hire you, even if you were the perfect candidate.
Maybe one day we'll have a sane market again thst hires on the quality of the candidate. But that's not 2025.
That was a joke. I did ask ChatGPT how much trouble I could get into by saying their name and it wasn't clear but honestly the problem is bigger than one company so I don't really need to throw them under the bus anyway.
As consultant I have learnt to answer what others are looking for, instead of what I actually think.
Maybe you need to work on soft skills, learn on how to read other's expectations, so that you can dynamically adapt your strategy to meet their expectations.
The job market is pretty tough at the moment and every job will have many qualified candidates applying.
I would not take this failure too much to heart. There will be quite a few other people who applied and also went all the way through the process only to be rejected at the end.
In these circumstances it can be very marginal things that sway the balance in favour or against one candidate.
Did you do practice interviews? I highly recommend doing pramp.com and/or paying for actual interview feedback.
Until you have someone with nothing to lose giving you brutally honest feedback, you won't know what the issue is. Years ago I had thought I passed technical interviews but I had given non optimal code.
I had one mock interviewer (paid) tell me I wasn't explaining my solutions enough and I needed to take charge of the conversation more.
Invest some time into finding out what your real weaknesses are.
I mean, I don't disagree in principle but in practice I don't have years to spend waiting for the perfect job. I have decent savings so if I need to survive I can for awhile, but not forever.
Fair. To be more constructive in that case, I think you're trying to change the wrong thing. The last thing you should be changing is your personality. Look elsewhere.
I never do this. If I am hired then my personality comes along as part of the package. If the potential employer and coworkers reject my personality then the position is not a good match.
For what it is worth in my recent experience most interviewers have commented about how pleasant and likable I am before they reject me, usually for some perceived technical flaw such as not realizing the essence of software quality is embracing their favorite fuzzing solution.
I'm actually surprised that they gave you a reason. Usually I get some email like "while we were impressed by your skills and enjoyed talking to you, we do not believe that you're a good fit for CompanyX".
Treat it like a conversation with a mutual friend. You aren't close and dying of laugher but you have that familiarity with each other which lightens the mood.
You are looking at this from your perspective, which is either pass or fail.
From their perspective, they might be interviewing, say, six people. As you say, they've already weeded out people from their resumes before they even get to the interview. From my experience, and I have heard people note this before, interviews tend to be a Gaussian curve with a normal distribution. People are weeded out by resumes and such. However, if I interview six people, usually someone slips through the cracks who knows nothing or next to nothing. That leaves the remaining five.
Of the five, four are usually interchangeable. They're like you - they get the technical questions right, or right enough. It's obvious they've been writing features for code for a company like yours. But of the five, often one person seems to not just know the easiest questions, or normal questions, but has a very good understanding of the subject matter. You keep probing how much they know, and they have in-depth knowledge about a lot of things. They know how registers on a processor work, they know about cache, they know the big O space of various algorithms, they can explain different approaches to concurrency in depth, or testing, or a lot of things. So you got the answers right, they just did better.
It could be something else - you might be just as good as someone else, but they were recommended by someone already on the team, or on an adjacent team, and they get brought in.
I guess personalities are on a bell curve as well. Maybe one out of six people fail on this. Maybe they're disorganized, or immature, or arrogant. Sometimes they miss basic social cues, or don't follow instructions, or even seem like they have a screw loose. Then four out of six people seem nice enough - professional but friendly. Then maybe one out of six just seems very sharp and smart, or avuncular, or what have you. A lot of it ties together - someone who has done the work to learn a programming language more than the other candidates, you assume is going to be hard-working on features as well, and they also seem sharp because they know so much (about IT, but other things as well).
Some things are contrasting. The hard-working person who knows the programming language in and out, and who gets a lot of feature work done is probably willing to sacrifice a little comity within the group to get a feature out. On the other hand, some people are so stubborn and argumentative, their presence would be a negative, even if they have technical skills. But some personality traits can contrast - I've working with friendly, supportive leads with great technical skills, but if they are a little bit hard charging this type of thing might be expected to come with the package of being very good technically.
Take theater classes. Or join a (team) sports club. Both teach you skills that you most likely will not acquire elsewhere and that are directly applicable to interviews.
Also, having been on both sides, I can tell you that hiring is just a crap shoot. My (anecdotal!) experience is that a lot of hiring is e8ther 50% gut feelings-based or 50% keyword-based. And in the worse case, both.
It's not just this one employer. It's been months and I've had pretty limited success. This has happened with dozens of employers and after a certain point I have to assume I'm doing something wrong.
My advice is 2 portions of Chivas Regal 4 hours before the interview and then 2 full bottles of The Famous Grouse and Blue Label, 15 minutes before.
Then, let it flow.
If they don't get that you are a good tech guy, move on, they don't deserve you.
Now, I've had a few strange things myself with interviews. Except for the company I ended work for, all other were a disaster. Everyone from HR knew 0 about Linux or programming.
One guy was really dumb. We talked about bash for Linux and at the end he starts reading his notes and says "Sad you did not talk about scripting in Linux..." and I just went "Ok bye bye".
Oh I have a bunch of anecdotes about interviewers from BigCos that knew absolutely nothing about concurrent programming but thought that they knew a lot about concurrent programming and "corrected" my answers during the interview. There's a lot of confidently incorrect people at the staff level of big corporations, and it's a little concerning.
Before someone thinks I'm being cocky about me being right and them being wrong, after every interview involving concurrency I always write a PlusCal/TLA+ spec with my answer and use the model checker to make sure that my answer actually solved the problem correctly. This is why I can be confident that my answers were correct; I'm not smarter than anyone really, it's just that I try and verify my work.
Due to sleep apnea, I've avoided any alcohol for the last couple years.
I've never really had much of an issue saying what's on my mind, so I don't know that alcohol would really help me much, generally all alcohol does is make me louder and sleepy; according to my wife I don't really talk different when I'm drunk.
Have you tried asking them whey they didn't select you? If you express genuine disappointment and ask what it was about you that didn't fit what they were looking for, there's a reasonable chance they'll give you feedback on the interview.
In this particular case I actually have a phone call with the recruiter scheduled today to ask why they passed on me.
In general they don't tell me when I do ask though. I understand that; they don't want to risk me suing them if they divulge anything that could be even construed as illegal, I probably wouldn't give feedback either honestly.
Don’t badmouth people. People who badmouth someone else will badmouth you.
Imagine the kind of person you’d want to work with (capable, calm, reliable) project the persona of the person you want to work with.
It’s ok not to lie. But you can also not say something about someone that you wouldn’t assay to them.
I interviewed someone once who was technically awesome and not a single person in the interview panel wanted to work with him.
Using a 3 pt impromptu speaking style of responding can help a lot. Many people ramble and aren't concise which can appear evasive.
Practicing public speaking can make you aware of your verbal tics - uhms ahs or saying "stuff" you use which can make you sound like you don't know what you're talking about.
Aggressively apply to jobs you don't want just for the interview practice. And study "good answers" to common questions on the internet ("strong points ? Weaknesses?" Fluff).
I do a fair amount of public speaking (I've spoken at Lambda Days six times, the Clojure Conj once), and I was a university lecturer, so that stuff isn't too hard for me.
I'm definitely guilty of rambling though; it's pretty hard for me to do say concisely. I'm not 100% sure of the best way to get better at that.
As an technical interviewer in a startup (50 people with like 20 devs), I think the culture fit and communication skills are more important than the pure technical skills.
Multiple times we rejected strong senior devs because of that. It could be things like:
- language issues eg. we have to repeat questions multiple times
- bad team players eg. they feel close minded, they seem judgemental
On the other hand, we recruited juniors who were not great technically but who had a positive mindset and the potential to grow. And I think they were the best people we hired.
Having integrity means not putting on an act. If you're trying too hard to please rather than be yourself, that comes across as dishonest and untrustworthy.
As it stands I don't really think I'm putting on an act during interviews. I am a very bad liar and if I lie people can tell almost immediately so generally I tend to be pretty brutally honest, and my personality more or less shines through there.
I don't really want to put on an act, I guess I'm asking for more "how do you present forward the more positive parts of your personality and quiet the bad parts during an interview?"
I acknowledge there is still some dishonesty in that, my personality is a package deal, good and bad, but I do think that most of my coworkers end up liking me after they get to know me.
It was for a different field, but I realised once I had run the interview process from the other side, I had a much better vocabulary and confidence answering related questions.
Perhaps setup a fake interview with a friend, really think about what you would ask from that position and dry run it a bit?
> It has really annoyed me; I ended up doing three interviews over the course of four weeks, and I'm pretty confident that I got the technical questions right. It could be that my resume is too "jumpy", which is fair, but they could have read my resume before they wasted my time and theirs with three multi-hour interviews.
If they're interviewing you, then it's likely that at least someone read your resume and decided that you were possibly a good enough fit to spend many hours of time talking to and debriefing about. It's more likely that you didn't provide enough good signals to hire in the interview.
The way to look at any interview is that it has to provide a signal to hire. Technical correctness is just one of those signals. It's an important one, but the other aspects are also important. Some things that will set you aside from other technical competent people:
- Tech is often a place where the interviewers are actually doing the job at a similar level to you rather than just being HR / Managers. Treat interviewers not as a gatekeeper to a job, but instead as a potential future peer. Start with the mindset of "Would I like to work with this person, and how can I convince them that they'd like to work with me". This reframes the interview as more of a collaborative effort to getting you that job than just a "solve the problems, tick the boxes" type thing.
- Learn / write / *practice out loud* a good way to introduce yourself. What's your 2 minute story, what drives you, why are you here? Interviewers often most recall the first and last things you said in an interview the most and perhaps one other moment. Looking at the first line of your hn bio "Eccentric math-enthusiast/wannabe-intellectual in NYC." has 3 words that hold at negative interpretations / no hire signals. Sometimes less is more here. In a recent interview, I had a longer 3 paragraph intro prepared, but the interviewer jumped in after the first and basically said something similar to "That's exactly my story, we need more people like that". I shut my mouth immediately on the rest of the intro because the connection bit was done.
- You mentioned in several comments below being corrected in interviews but knowing you're right. This really actually doesn't matter in many cases. These moments are perfect place for you to demonstrate humility and how you deal with feedback. These are key skills of a team player. What actually matters most is how you handle that interaction. Take that and use it to proved a signal to hire by acting like a colleague not a robot. Something as simple as "I hear you want to ..., let's dig deeper into that in case I've missed something in my approach." is the very basic part of this.
- Put yourself in the mindset of having gotten the job and started working in the job. What would that look like? How would you act? You often have a small amount of time at the beginning or end of an interview round to ask questions about the person's job, team, work environment. Ask questions that provide good signals and demonstrate that you're someone that they'd want to work with. E.g. ones about day to day activities, team interactions, culture, internal promotions, etc.
I'd recommend finding a way to get a software development manager friend or acquaintance to interview you and provide feedback. Reach out to your network and find someone that can give you honest advice (if you know other employed devs then you have second degree contacts). If you can't find this in your network, then consider paying for it (e.g. something like interviewing.io or hellointerview.com). The benefit of doing it with a friend is that you're much more relaxed about things and can take that same relaxation to the way you interview.
For most software development interviews you're going to have a system design and a behavioral round. Watch youtube videos about tech interviewing and system design (Hello Interview, . Spend time practicing using the tools that you might see in interviews (e.g. coderpad, excalidraw) so that you're not spending time learning the tooling and instead you can focus purely on the interview.
A few soft skills books worth reading are "How to Win Friends and Influence People" by Dale Carnegie, and "The Secrets to Consulting Success" by Gerald M Weinberg. They're not interviewing specific, but both have a bunch of things related to giving and taking advice (which is what we spend a lot of our time doing as software engineers).
---
Something that you might consider trying is using a LLM to help you prepare (ChatGPT or your favorite local model). Vibe code your own interview personality coach.
First, set yourself up with a bunch of context: all the (mainly) non technical questions you've been asked in interviews, a copy of your resume, and any extra relevant info about yourself (your projects / goals / etc.), job roles and descriptions docs of jobs that you might want to do (find a bunch of these on big company websites). Ask the LLM for ideas for other context to add.
Then write your answers to the questions. Have the LLM analyze your tone, look for signals to hire, and suggest improvements to the way that you answer. Have the LLM come up with similar questions that might be asked and start practicing them. Have the LLM build a framework for answering that suits your approach. I like the CARL (Context, Action, Result, and Learning) approach over the more typical STAR (Situation, Task, Action, Result) as it provides more and better signals earlier in your response.
Use the LLM to meta-analyze the process ("come up with the top 10 reasons that software engineers fail in interviews for ... with ... context. Build a checklist of areas to analyze response"). If you have access to agentic tooling (e.g. Github copilot, Codex CLI, Claude Code), use it to build markdown summaries of things to look back on instead of leaving this info in your LLM chat history. Perhaps feed your blog posts and twitter history into the same checklist - you might find that the signals that you're putting out to the world have some glaring obvious problems that you're blind to because of your intimate familiarity, biases and assumptions.
I gotta admit that it saddens me a little to think that calling myself a "wannabe-intellectual" or "eccentric" would have any connotation other than very mild self-deprecation, but I suppose it won't hurt to make it simpler in the shorter term.
> This really actually doesn't matter in many cases. These moments are perfect place for you to demonstrate humility and how you deal with feedback.
That's decent enough advice, but when people confidently "correct" me with something that's actively wrong, it's always a bit jarring to me. It takes me a like thirty seconds to parse their feedback, read to make sure that my code isn't wrong, and then process that I need to somehow respond to it. It's difficult to know what to say at that point.
I dunno. This post has given me a lot to think about.
> I gotta admit that it saddens me a little to think that calling myself a "wannabe-intellectual" or "eccentric" would have any connotation other than very mild self-deprecation, but I suppose it won't hurt to make it simpler in the shorter term.
Don't stress on changing that too much - it's unlikely that an interviewer is going as deep as your hacker news profile. Eccentric can mean flaky and unreliable. Wannabe can mean aspiring but perpetually falling short. Neither put your best foot forward. I merely pointed that out as something that if you're generally seeing that view of your self then you might be presenting that outward.
A good way of looking at the interview process is that you want to give out as many strong-hire signals as possible. You need to find ways to turn no-hire signals into weak hire signals. (E.g. silly little things like "I don't have experience with that, but I've worked with ... where ...", or "I <did something that didn't work out> but <learnt> and <carried that learning to succeed in ...>", and you definitely want 0 no-hire signals.
> That's decent enough advice, but when people confidently "correct" me with something that's actively wrong, it's always a bit jarring to me.
Sounds a bit like you might need to expose yourself to be challenged by external viewpoints more often. Find an open source product to contribute some fixes to and see how the PRs go paying particular note about the communication aspects.
BTW, you might want to reconsider the domain that your GitHub profile currently points at.
Will be blunt since I imagine you're fed up and don't want affirmations.
In the most common case where I see engineers who say they struggle with the soft skills parts of interviewing, the underlying issue is a lack of skill in communication - working out what's important, stating it clearly and concisely, and in a way appropriate to the audience. I read some of your blog and found it pleasantly chatty, well structured, and obviously technical. If you communicate like you do in writing, there is obviously no problem there. I have no doubt that your account of performing well on technical questions is correct. However...
After some quick google searches, what I did find in your digital footprint is:
- A relatively high number of online posts complaining about employers in general across several years
- A tweet from a few years ago where you say you're fed up of software engineering but are forced to stick with it
- (as you stated) a jumpy work history
My best guess is that you're failing the digital footprint check. If I was hiring and post interview was doing a little more digging on candidates to help do a final pick, I would look at the short tenures, the outwardly directed frustration at employers, the stated lack of desire to be a software engineer at all, and pass on you.
As for why this is happening after several technical interviews? Most likely that's when you undergo final background checks and get cut out of the process. If you are burned out, sick of workplace social narratives, and don't want to work as a software engineer, I sincerely empathise for you. However: don't let me, a random hacker news commenter, find that out in under 2 minutes of time spent on Google.
I actually do appreciate the advice and blunt feedback, because you're right, I'm a little tired of affirmations. I honestly forgot about the tweets from years ago where I was pretty burnt out. I will be deleting those shortly.
The posts on LinkedIn should probably go too.
LinkedIn is not a place to air grievances. It’s a place to post your job history, post jobs, and “like” when others have been promoted
I agree that's what it should be, but that absolutely not what it is and it hasn't been that way for many years. People treat LinkedIn like Facebook and post their opinions on things.
Most of the potentially worrisome stuff I've posted has been comments responding to other peoples' posts. I went and deleted nearly all of those, though.
Just because some people treat it like Facebook doesn't mean you need to treat it like Facebook.
You're not wrong. That's why I was happy enough to delete all my posts.
Really appreciate seeing comments like this on HN. You got me thinking about my own presence online. I decided to use gpt-5-thinking and perplexity's deep research with the same prompt to deep dive on my legal name, find aliases, research those aliases, etc. Then report on positive and negatives findings. Both did a good job and helped me feel a bit at ease. They both noticed that I worked at a place that later had a controversy and knew that I left prior to that but gave actionable ideas on how to answer questions around that during interviews or via linkedin. I think I might set up a perplexity task to run and email this once a month.
I'll probably one seperate ones for my own handles that are not attached to my name to monitor them as well. The panopticon never sleeps.
Yeah honestly it really is something I hadn't considered much, especially my old Twitter which I haven't logged into for years and the last posts were when I was in an extremely bad state mentally. I completely forgot about it even existing, but of course whether or not I remembered it doesn't mean it won't potentially hurt my prospects.
It's impossible to know how many jobs I've been turned down for due to my online presence and edgy takes; most of my takes really aren't that edgy or even that out there, but they might be enough make a potential employer think twice.
I just deleted my old Twitter, my Reddit account, and most of my posts on LinkedIn. I don't think any of them were really that bad but I don't really need them haunting me for forever.
How did you manage to get perplexity deep research to do research about yourself? I keep getting denied based on privacy rules and policies
i’m using perplexity pro set to deep research with this prompt:
read the hackernews comments on this link to understand how someone's digital footprint might affect their ability to get hired. Then do that research against me, <first last>, to help me understand what is available about me out there that could help or harm my ability to compete. See if there are any internet handles that you can associate with me, if so, research them too.
<hn link>
Because of these "digital footprint checks" now nobody can truly say what they want online. Either you have to put on a fake persona or just go completely silent. It’s self-censorship in disguise. Dead Internet Theory confirmed.
Once upon a time, we were told not to share our real name or personal info online with strangers. That remains wisdom!
I mean, I dunno. I attached my name to these things because these are opinions I do really hold. I could have easily done this under a pseudonym, but I didn't, and if I am going to attach my name to it (or an alias easily tied to m), then I can't really get upset that people associate these opinions to me.
Some of these opinions are ones I don't really hold anymore so deleting isn't a big deal. I will admit that some of the ones I am deleting upset me because I still do think that way.
This kind of response shows humility and self-awareness. I have no doubt you'll do great after a tidy up. Not an empty affirmation. Good luck stranger.
Just create 2 accounts
A good reason to not have social media. Thinking if my vent post will upset a future employer on a Saturday afternoon is not the future I want.
I was declined from a job recently specifically because I wrote a blog post about my history with depression and medication for it [1]. That's not me justifying after the fact, they actually told me this.
I took down most of the posts on my blog that were personal as a result. Most of the stuff on there now is just technical stuff that I'm not too worried about being attached to my name.
[1] To be clear, the blog post was only talking about prescribed medication, I've never done any illegal drugs and I've never been an alcoholic, I'm not speaking in code for "self medicating".
Hope you got that in writing, because that is a hell of a ADA lawsuit you've got there.
This company doesn't have fifteen employees so I don't think I'd have much recourse regardless, but it was over the phone and it wasn't recorded. It would be my word against theirs. I did end up reporting them to the NYC Department of Labor, though.
Of course, they were just the ones stupid enough to be honest about it. I have no idea how many jobs I've been declined for where they just gave me a generic form letter.
A good reason to have an anonymous account to post negative things on. Never post honest negativity under your real name. Unless you work for yourself or your vulnerability is a sort of marketing, you're only hurting yourself. Make an anon account, vent as much as you want.
If I'm hiring someone, I want to like working with them, and if I find them ranting online, I just mark them as negative and pessimistic. I can't help it - that's human nature
> If I'm hiring someone, I want to like working with them, and if I find them ranting online, I just mark them as negative and pessimistic. I can't help it - that's human nature
I understand this, but we can agree that this kind of sucks, doesn't it? Everyone has bad days where they're frustrated about something and could write something a bit cynical in the process. I don't think that's reflective of their entire personality. From Ted Lasso:
> I hope that either all of us or none of us are judged by the actions of our weakest moments… but rather by the strength we show when, and if we’re ever given a second chance
Dunno, obviously you don't want someone who's a downer all the time, but I feel like the permanence of the internet can skew perspectives.
Sure, but when I've spent 30 mins talking to you and you look the same on paper as the other 5 competent candidates and I need to make a choice on who to hire, any data point that portrays you negatively is an easy way to narrow my decision.
Then they get upset that you either don't have socials (antisocial, don't hire), or hide them (untrustworthy, don't hire).
It's awful. I think the best thing is maybe a fake profile you touch once a year.
Outside of some jobs requiring LinkedIn, I've never actually heard of anyone being declined for not having social media.
I haven't had a Facebook account since 2015, I don't have an Instagram and I hadn't updated my Twitter for years until I deleted it (about two hours ago). As far as I'm aware, a lack of social media presence hasn't been a factor.
Only social media I have now is Hacker News.
> I've never actually heard of anyone being declined for not having social media
In late June 2025, the US announced that for inbound students from abroad it will be screening socials, and lack of an unlocked social footprint may be a disqualifier.
This brings the gov in line with private industry, as employers that do actual background checks (as opposed to, say, credit checks) are shown flags if socials are all locked or none exist.
This matters most in industries which are required by their regulators to do and/or maintain backgrounds.
Oh my.
I'm not sure why that would be suspicious. If I were planning nefarious stuff, it's not like it would be hard for me to make have a social media presence to fly under the radar.
You wouldn't know if you were declined, you'd just be another application they wouldn't respond to, or just get a generic message
Yeah that's fair.
It's probably still better overall to have no social media compared to social media with edgy takes.
I think lack of social media makes me stand out.
I always say I am the type of person who would post too often so instead of having social media I just read non-fiction books.
So far no one has held being well read against me.
Often, it flips to a book recommendation actually. At that point good luck with your social media when I pick a book that fits perfectly in with the marketing of myself getting the job, create a whole interesting conversation in that direction, while they read some inane nonsense from the social media poster.
at some point the AI based searching is going to just make it that much easier to incorporate social posts on any background checks.
Just dropping in to say, i appreciate this comment, and i have no skin in the game whatsoever. Upvote didn't feel enough.
Don't change who you are for an interview. It will just result in a job where you aren't happy being a different version of yourself. I know it is frustrating to not find work, but finding work that isn't right for you brings whole new levels of frustration later.
And, as others have said... this rejection might have nothing to do with you. If they had 1000 applications, and you were their choice above 998 of them, you still get the rejection because they hired the person who was above 999 of them.
100% untrue. Hiring is a social game. You want to put your best foot forward, and then slowly let out your truer self over time. Much like dating - you don't want to air all your dirty laundry on the first date. Don't lie about who you are but at the same time people are more tolerant of your quirks once they get to know you better
I actually more or less did air all my dirty laundry on my first date with my wife, and we've been together since 2013, so at least that worked out ok.
Still overall I think I agree with you. I think most techy people tend to like me if they talk to me for awhile, but I can be kind of abrasive with initial impressions.
I'm just psychoanalyzing myself at this point; overall good advice...thanks!
While I completely agree with hiding who you are for work, I code switch for work with the best of them. I am a customer facing consultant in rooms with decision makers, I aired all of my dirty laundry with my now wife because I didn’t want to waste my time or hers.
We had been working together for two years. But not in the same department. I just started talking to her one day in the parking lot and she finally said “are you going to stop staring at me and ask for my number”.
I was not thinking about dating at the time. I had just come out of a bad situation less than a year earlier and I was trying to get my financial house in order - it was 2011 and I had made some bad real estate decisions before the housing crash and I was trying to get my career on track.
I was happy with just hanging out with my long term female friends at the time and they provided all of the emotional and companionship needs I had with no complications. My friends and I traveled together, went out on “dates” (do you call it that when you are just doing date like things with no emotional or physical expectations?) etc.
When I told my now wife all I was going through it didn’t scare her away. She was just as up front with me. We were married seven months later. 15 years in, I still don’t feel like she kept anything from me that I didn’t know about her during the first two weeks and vice versa.
This though is horrible general advice as far as dating. I wasn’t pursuing her. We knew of each other from work so I wasn’t a complete stranger and we were both in our mid 30s and divorced then and she had two boys.
I wasn’t in the headspace to seriously be in the “dating scene” then.
I know how to small talk now and have studied conversational skills for my career. If I were out there now, I would do things differently.
For those wondering if you are privileged enough to willingly make yourself ineligible for some jobs that your qualified for like the above poster is:
This has never been my experience. Quirkyness in the interview loops have never dictated my on the job experience. And having been pulled in to conduct interviews, I can say that its all so last minute and unplanned, that it reinforces how little it matters. Judge a company all you want, just get the offer first.
You’ll probably never talk with the hiring manager or that recruiter again. You’ll probably be working with a different PM and engineers.
I've rounded lots of sharp edges off my personality over the years, having been rejected a lot and having made unforced errors.
The problem with advice here is that, if you're right and there's something personality-related and it's not just fierce competition or tiny sample size, we can't really tell through a post. I'm talking about the je ne sais quoi of you, the body language, the attitude, the unwritten vibe you give off, and posting videos here is uh, well, yeah, unlikely.
So, I'd echo the advice of others to talk to your friends and ask them to give you feedback. Hopefully they're observant and willing to be blunt.
I'll opine, though - have you tried a little masking and humility? I ask because if I had to guess based on probability, the archetype of the highly intelligent, technically excellent nerd tends to also run adjacent to underdeveloped social skills, or at least indifference to using them. Arrogance, defensiveness, ego abound. That's what I coach my team and friends on who have cracked this type of discussion open.
If you were going to mask for an interview, coming across humble/hungry/smart (smart is probably not a problem for most here, but humble?...). Consider mirroring with the interviewer. Stay detached and practice this, especially when a finger is pointed at you or you don't ace a question, or they disagree.
In all, it's probably the stuff you can't describe easily without being next to you. You may not even realize the signals you're putting off, if that is even what's going on.
I know the struggle - my wife has been turned down over and over and over, and she takes it personally, but she's also going for jobs that clearly have tons of great applicants. Is it her attitude? Did she make a mistake bringing up that experience? Or maybe...or maybe it's just out of our control, and we have to stick to the plan and stay in the market. The losing move is not to play.
Yeah, none of this is bad advice at all.
In my normal personal life I tend to be pretty sarcastic and self-deprecating. My therapist says it might be a defense mechanism to avoid actually confronting problems; if you make a person you're talking to laugh then they usually think everything is fine and stop worrying about you.
I try not to do that during interviews. I don't think I'm coming off like I'm trying hard to be smart or brag, but it's very possible and likely that some level of my normal insecurities are bleeding through, and that happening even subtly might be enough to poison it for me.
That's definitely a tough one. In an interview you are literally selling yourself. You don't want to be off-putting with outsized arrogance, but you also don't want to be so humble that people question your actual skill level.
The rejection might also be random and out of your control. E.g. if they already filled the position or the higher-ups decided to save costs by taking back open headcount. Frustrating for sure, but not actionable.
From my POV, if you don’t have any strong signals about why you were rejected, I would just move on rather than trying to infer the reason.
Had to scroll too far down the page for this response. I wouldn't try to guess the reason why any particular company rejected you. 1. They usually aren't going to tell you why. 2. If they do, it's not necessarily going to be the real reason. There are so many internal reasons for not choosing to move forward with a candidate that have nothing to do with the candidate or their interview performance. The company's internal priorities and projects might have suddenly shifted. The headcount may no longer exist anymore. The hiring manager may have decided they really don't need another person after all. The job might not have existed in the first place and they're just fishing. The job might exist but they already know who they want and are doing throwaway interviews as a formality or for legal compliance reasons. Or they're just randomly rejecting candidates because they don't want to hire someone who is unlucky. No way to know for sure.
This isn't 2021 anymore. You need to recalibrate your world view.
There are probably 300 people interviewing for the job you interviewed for. So they need to not just pick someone who checks the boxes, but the BEST of all the people who checked the boxes.
Assuming you checked all the boxes, you weren't the best and someone else was chosen. That's all it is. What makes them the best? Who knows. There's likely 50 of them they had to choose from.
Job hunting has always been a numbers game but now it's worse by a factor of 100x. Don't take it personally, and keep going.
Yeah, at some level I know this; I've given interviews before and seen people get declined for the dumbest reasons, or no reason at all, and I usually give people this same advice when they're down.
Dunno, it's just hard not to take this a bit personally sometimes. As I said, if I felt like I knew what I was screwing up, then that would be something I could work on. It's not hard to buy textbooks and learn more about concurrency theory or distributed systems or something, or to build a project on my server to play with a library, or something like that. It's extremely hard to solve a problem if you have no idea what the problem even is.
You're not wrong with anything you said though. I just need to keep applying and go from there.
If you don't keep a stiff upper lip and be emotionally and mentally resilient about this, then someone who is exactly like you but has the resilience to keep going on will take your job.
This is the worst job market I've seen since the dot com bust. It's much worse than the Financial Crisis. There are tens of thousands of out of work programmers, and in the next few years more and more new grads are joining the mix. You have to understand who your competition is. There is also the existential crisis of AI taking our jobs as well hanging over us. It's pretty rough out there. That said, during the dotcom bust is when we first saw offshoring to India and people were worried to death that all the jobs were going to go to India and for the most part they didn't, there was still a competitive advantage to continue hiring in the US for the next 20 years.
The only way to get a job right now is either through connections from a friend or coworker that thinks you're great, or by hustling and applying to thousands of jobs, or by forming your own company.
Everything you know about finding a job, increase things by 100x. If last time you sent out 20 resumes and got a job, this time send out 2000 resumes. I'm not joking.
It's going to be tough, but if you're resilient, you will find a job. If you're worried about money, move your spending down to as close to 0 as possible. Move in with friends or family, eat ramen, and keep applying. You can do it!
> It's much worse than the Financial Crisis.
That's not saying much. While there was a month or two early on where it was a bit touch and go, granted, all-in-all the Financial Crisis period was one of the best times ever to be a programmer. That was the App Store gold rush era and all the investment dollars running away from every other industry due to financial crisis concerns was funnelling into tech.
Oh I know, I will keep applying and hoping for the best, obviously. I don't really have the privilege of being able to give up, as I need to pay my mortgage.
It's just a bit discouraging sometimes. I don't really think I'd be a worse engineer than most people they end up hiring, so it's hard to not take this personally sometimes.
99% of the time, when I'm rejected I just roll my eyes and move on, but every now and then (and it appears to be kind of stochastic), one rejection will just get a bit more under my skin than others. I've been rejected for thousands of jobs and I don't have a crisis for each one.
> or to build a project on my server to play with a library, or something like that.
If you are up for playing, why not play with sales and marketing? Playing isn't limited to tech. Grab a pencil from your drawer and try to get someone to buy it. Just like with those little low stakes tech projects, as you keep prodding at it to get it to work, you are bound to learn something.
And if you truly have nothing left to learn about sales and marketing, well, then you will have at least learned that the problem you have isn't what you are currently suspecting.
There are 300 random candidates but probably only 3 viable candidates.
There are probably 300
This isn't really true. There are 300 people that might apply but only a few that ever get interviewed. If they are interviewing 300 people then the company doesn't even know what it wants.
The problem is that it doesn’t matter if you are one of the 300 that are most qualified, your resume may not even viewed or your application may not be seen. LinkedIn shows you both for Easy Apply.
In my niche, I was objectively one of the most qualified in the industry. But I heard crickets last year and the year before when randomly submitting my application to ATS’s.
Don’t cry for me. That was my “Plan C”. Plan A of using my network landed me two full time offers and one contract and my plan B of personal outreach to companies looking for my specific skillset led to two interviews and one offer all in less than a month.
Last year, I just answered one recruiter’s outreach and had an interview and offer that was a perfect fit within two weeks.
Let me say first I understand the frustration you must be feeling right now. It's no fun to be under the gun with bills to pay and think you're getting turned down from jobs because of something that isn't even really the core of the work (at least that's my assumption).
You don't have to be 100% sure about what it is personality-wise that you need to tune up to start making changes. You're an intelligent agent; your intuition is much better than random about things like this. I would say act on your intuitions about what specifically you are going that is rubbing them the wrong way, and be less like that - regress a little to the mean, in other words. This is generally good advice in the business world, even if it isn't good advice for e.g. becoming a celebrity on Twitter.
Take note that most psychological studies suggest that personality is very unlikely to change dramatically in adulthood no matter what you do. It's better to focus on techniques that let you chill out for a few hours/days/weeks than it is to try to actually change who you are at core.
I was well into my early 40s when I wound up working with someone who had most of my own personality quirks tuned up to 11. It was the most eye opening experience of my career and allowed me to see, observe and truly understand a lot of the advice I'd been given throughout my life.
Deep introspection is really hard. Assuming it is you that is the problem, and working from that assumption is anything but natural for most people. Even in your own thoughts. Arrogance, defensiveness and a skewed sense of self are things most people tend to carry with them.
I've read, listened to (audio book) and otherwise experienced a lot of leadership training in my life. A lot of it didn't really click until I was at a point where I could really self reflect, and literally seeing my own flaws in another person changed me significantly.
So I like to use this metaphor (it was originally for dating but applies here too).
Think of your body. Specifically how tall you are. You can't easily change your height. However, you can do the following:
- workout
- wear clothes that fit you and flatter your particular body type
- etc
The same applies to interviews.
e.g. if you are a quiet, introverted person then there probably isn't much you can do if you are interviewing for a job that requires an outgoing personality like sales or event planning
However, you can get better at rapport, asking questions and seeming interested and excited in the role. A lot of this is also how you respond to questions. For example, if someone asks "Tell me about X", X can be either vague or you are not sure why they are asking. If you respond with "Well, I have a couple examples of X here they are: A, B, C. Which one would you like to hear about?" then that shows you are both experienced and also good at clarifying what is being asked.
One EXCELLENT way to practice this is to reach out to friends or family members who have done a lot of interviewing and have them do a mock interview. This is useful b/c they know both:
- what hiring managers are looking for in general
- you as a person and what may be "the best side of you" vs "pretending to be something you're not"
I will also repeat what some other commenters have said:
You are interviewing them as much as they are interviewing you. Much like a marriage, you want to partner with someone that "fits" with you and vice versa. In other words,
> e.g. if you are a quiet, introverted person then there probably isn't much you can do if you are interviewing for a job that requires an outgoing personality like sales or event planning
Learning how to talk to people, read a room, small talk, etc can be learned. I’m definitely an introvert by nature. But people in a professional setting are really not that much different than computer systems. Once you understand different type of personalities, you learn what input gets you what output.
The Career Tools/Manager Tools podcasts has dozens of podcasts about dealing with people with different DISC profiles.
One secret I use when starting a conversation with someone new is “what keeps you busy?” and act interested and ask open ended follow up questions.
Speaking from my experiences in dozens of debriefs: I don't think I can recall a case where an otherwise good candidate was rejected for something like not liking someone's personality.
There might be a middle ground between "technical skills" and "personality", though, which we do take into account, falling under "soft skills", which may be affected by certain personality traits. Things like polling the interviewer for their thoughts, asking thoughtful questions, being curious about the source of disagreement or misunderstanding, not being dogmatic, and so on. I think it can be harder to demonstrate these kinds of skills with certain personality types -- I used to be very nervous in interviews, and it wasn't always easy to have the presence of mind to exercise these soft skills.
But even still, at least in technical interviews like programming or system design (as opposed to cross-functional/manager/tech leadership interviews), I've found it relatively rare for a candidate to be rejected for 'soft skill' failures when the right signals are there for technical strength.
I just think it has to be soft skills in a few particular cases; I always check my work after the interview to see if I got the questions right, almost always by writing a PlusCal spec and checking against the invariants that they specified. Sometimes my answer is wrong and doesn't satisfy the invariant and there's edge cases that I didn't consider, and when that's the case I'm not really surprised when I'm rejected.
But when I get the technical questions correct and TLA+ seems to agree with me, that's where I get really confused. I'm not typically interviewing for management positions, I'm interviewing for engineering jobs.
I would counter, in that depending on the position(s) and candidate pool soft skills will make all the difference in the world when choosing between two technically sufficient candidates. It may not even be a conscious bias, so much as, "I'd rather work with this person."
Most technical jobs can be done by most sufficiently skilled, or motivated candidates with enough intellect to handle the work. Not always to a certain level of craft, efficiency or trend setting, but it's not about that to most business stakeholders. I say this as someone who deeply cares about the craft, despite a rather insulting depiction, including some of my opinions and age I came across earlier today (grugbrain.dev).
Likeability is hard, and even then striking a balance in a given context is also hard. It often comes down to a level of self-reflection, which is where I think TFA is at right now. Which is an attempt to establish a balance of personal responsibility, with "culture fit." Given that many of us have personality traits that tend to be deviations from the norm in many ways, it's all that more important to understand that in ourselves and our efforts to adapt to society.
A pinnacle of this in Television is the show Dexter, where he regularly brings in doughnuts. I've had coworkers that did similar, and it's impressive the amount of affect this has on the working environment and relationships in turn.
Beyond this, comes the counter-intuitive position of being far more skilled than an interviewer. This can definitely work against you at times as well for a number of reasons. Just because you are the most technically adept for a position, doesn't mean you get the position. The technical aspects of most jobs are more about a minimum of, can they do the job. Not, are they the best fit.
> Beyond this, comes the counter-intuitive position of being far more skilled than an interviewer. This can definitely work against you at times as well for a number of reasons. Just because you are the most technically adept for a position, doesn't mean you get the position. The technical aspects of most jobs are more about a minimum of, can they do the job. Not, are they the best fit.
This has been happening to me a bit, at an increasing frequency lately
I don't want to come off as cocky, but I think I have a decent understanding of concurrency and distributed systems, and I think a lot of interviewers simply do not. Sometimes I'm "corrected" on my whiteboard examples, and I have to push back because I'm not actually wrong about something.
And that kind of makes me seem like a douchebag, but at the same time I'm not going to pretend that I'm wrong on something if I don't genuinely think I might be wrong.
At its core is better "selling skills" In my last job I noticed how much better people that did jobs like waitressing before were more likeable by Clients. Small things like saying at the end "John thanks for your time..." Put the name first, people like that. But in the end you might have done well and failed you on salary requirements...
I used to be a lecturer and I did notice that that really helped my public speaking; I tend to talk really fast and being a lecturer forced me to learn how to speak slower, so it wouldn't surprise me that being a waiter or waitress would be helpful for this stuff.
I've always found it very irritating when I felt people were trying to force saying my name in a conversation, but I think you're probably right and I'm just a weird case.
Salary requirements are a valid point; in this most recent example my salary requirements were smack in the middle of the listed range so I don't think it was an issue for this particular one but it's possible that they feel I'm too expensive.
Sorry for being slightly off topic (though true to the topic in explicit: personality tuning before an interview).
I don't have much experience with interviews and never got a job you had to interview for (hopefully will at some point). So don't take it as a gospel.
4 out of 5 interviews I've ever had went fantastic. I stressed a lot before the interview (kind of anxious personality) and had a long (20min) meditation before. Very often, for some time after meditating, I get much less anxious, much more confident and humble.
That 1 of 5 interviews that was a trainwreck - well, I didn't meditate before it. I also didn't do a mock interview with ChatGPT right before it, and believe that lack of warmup did me in. Literally, the first thing I was to say that day was an answer to an interviewers question about myself. I got stuck, realized it's going really bad, got even more stressed and didn't answer a single question in a composed manner.
You have no idea what you even did wrong. What you need to do is call up your friends and have them mock interview you, there's even free platforms and exchanges where you can do that. Get some actual feedback, don't act on wild conjectures.
Also keep in mind it could be as simple as that they had a better candidate.
> don't act on wild conjectures.
The issue is not just this one company. I have been at this for months with similar stories for a lot of them.
Sometimes I get the technical questions wrong, so that's fair enough, I understand why they'd decline me for that and as I said that's something that I can at least work on for myself by reading through textbooks and/or building sample projects to understand a concept a bit better.
A lot of the time, though, I won't get the technical questions wrong, and it's this recurring thing of "I really don't know why I'm constantly being declined".
Mock interviews are a pretty good idea though.
I wouldn't focus on trying to tune your personality as that's not really sustainable. What if you get the job, are you going to continue living a second personality during working hours?
You'll never know the real reason you weren't hired anyway, so it doesn't make sense trying to focus on changing something that you don't know is a problem to begin with. You're assuming it is personality, but it could also be other things related or not to you.
Interviewing is ultimately a numbers game; you can get better at it (with the myriad interview-prep materiel out there), but you are still subject to various uncontrollable factors. The most significant thing you can do is apply to more jobs, and thus increase your odds of getting hired.
Is there someone you trust who has been a mentor to you at one of your past jobs? Send them a note and ask them to mock interview you. People love being asked favors and for their opinion.
You sound unsure and defeated in your post. Were you feeling confident the day of the interview, or do you think you seemed desperate for the job?
I will say that all the best technical interviews I have had are ones where I spoke in short sentences, was able to end on a point rather than rambling, and left plenty of time in my answers to ask questions of the reviewer and demonstrate curiosity.
I feel defeated now primarily because I really thought that I was going to get an offer on this job, so it kind of felt like a punch in the stomach when I got rejected this morning.
I think I was feeling confident enough during the interview, but it's entirely possible that some of my cynicism bled through in my intonations in the Zoom call.
I do tend to be long winded when I speak, so maybe that is working against me. I'll actually take that in mind.
Speaking as someone who has done a lot of interviewing of candidates - being long winded or an otherwise poor communicator is one of the most common reasons to reject someone.
It's definitely worth practicing to be concise and clear in your responses (and don't waffle on - something I'm guilty of). Learn when to stop talking too.
It's just tough for me, because I kind of take pride in being accurate and technical questions often have a lot of edge cases and caveats that I feel compelled to point out because I don't want to say inaccurate stuff.
But of course that can go onto infinity; at some point you need to summarize and accept you can't be 100% accurate. I guess I need to figure out how to strike a balance between "blathering on" and "hand-waving away details". I have no idea how to do that but that might be a good thing to get out of mock interviews.
You can just refer to the edge cases or caveats (so it's clear you are aware of them) and let the interviewer follow up on them if they want to. This makes the interview a bit more conversational and helps build rapport with the interviewer.
That's generally what I do, I bring things up just to handwave them away and acknowledge that they're there.
The problem is, of course, that even handwaving things away, there's still a near-infinite number of potential caveats for any given subject, and I always feel a compulsion to list all of them. I did bother a friend of mine last night in order to get him to tell me how much of my rambling is tolerable so hopefully I have a better handle on it now.
There could be a lot of reasons why they may have passed, and it could have absolutely nothing to do with you or your personality.
If it was just one company, I wouldn’t start trying to change who you are. If you make up a new personality for the interview and get the job, then what? How long can you keep the character going? Do you want to work with people you can’t be yourself around?
In terms of what to possibly change, that’s almost impossible to say without seeing what you’re like in an interview.
It's natural to feel this way. But the thing that you have to remember about interviews like this where you're doing multiple rounds is that a lot of times they'll have people come to a round table discussion. If one person says something negative, that can often change the course of whether or not you're going to get the job. It depends on how much influence that person typically has. A lot of times people might defer to that person,etc.
I recently started a new job (big upgrade from my last gig), and after onboarding, one of my interviewers told me that a major factor in him recommending me for hiring is that I "looked bored and ready to move on" during the technical interview. I'm not sure if trying to look bored is a winning strategy in general, but there is my personal anecdote.
This sounds incredibly autistic. You assume the failure is something about your personality for absolutely no reason. Second, you assume lying about your personality during an interview will get you a job or keep you employed.
I have an autistic child who goes through this. They have absolutely no idea why they could be annoying and just assume they are otherwise awesome.
I am not sure that abysmally low social intelligence due to neurodivergence can be fixed. But, you can improve your capacity for nonverbal listening and ask for feedback.
I didn’t say I wanted to lie about my personality. I said I wanted to tune my personality so that I do better in interviews. It’s subtly different; I wanted advice on putting my best foot forward, and I was wondering if people had ideas for doing so.
It’s not just about this one job, obviously it’s impossible to know what a single employer’s reasoning is for this stuff; I have just noticed a pattern of me being pretty bad at interviews, and being declined enough to where I probably need to make some kind of change. I am not asking for one simple hack to make friends, it’s fucking interview prep. I don’t think I have low social intelligence in most cases, I have never had much issue making friends or anything like that. I don’t dispute that I am probably annoying and I don’t think I am awesome.
It’s not like interviews are anything like actual human interaction in any meaningful sense, and clearly a lot of people must agree because there are dozens of specific “interview prep” services out there.
Employment is all about being a good fit for the employer, not about being a good developer. I am often not selected because I preference things that scares the shit out of most developers even if such things are hugely beneficial.
Interviews are just talking to people. Its not the same as a casual conversation, but its also not a hostile police interrogation. Nonetheless, its still just a conversation. If you imagine it to be something different then something different it becomes.
There's no tricks, some people just won't like you unfortunately. If you are doing your best to be friendly and helpful, those people can F off basically. Many people get off on the power trip of you being in weaker position, and show their true colors as well. Just move on, though I know everyone needs a job.
Sometimes, being declined based on personality is a good thing. Unless you are too confrontational or burnt out, in my experience, places that reject technically competent people based on the perceived lack of soft skills tend to be a mess, dominated by corridor politics and shenanigans.
There's also the fact that you may only have a position or two open and literally hundreds of candidates who are more than minimally qualified to do the job.
>Under the advisement of my lawyer (ChatGPT)
Well I see the problem already.
On topic: this job market is a complete circus and I wouldn't gleam any rejections as it having anything to do with any factor you can control. So many jobs just disappeared for me mid-interview, with a few ending up as ghosts after 4-5 rounds. There's interviews where I do well but it's clear they had someone else in the pipeline with double my experience. Recruiter disrespect is also at very high levels and you'll be rejected for reasons they cannot legally disclose. Then there's the whole outsourcing issue and how the interview never intended to hire you, even if you were the perfect candidate.
Maybe one day we'll have a sane market again thst hires on the quality of the candidate. But that's not 2025.
> Well I see the problem already.
That was a joke. I did ask ChatGPT how much trouble I could get into by saying their name and it wasn't clear but honestly the problem is bigger than one company so I don't really need to throw them under the bus anyway.
I don't disagree with anything you're saying.
Try this
https://www.google.com/search?q=bob+firestone+job+interview+...
I was having trouble with interviews circa 2006 and I bought his course and it was a great investment.
As consultant I have learnt to answer what others are looking for, instead of what I actually think.
Maybe you need to work on soft skills, learn on how to read other's expectations, so that you can dynamically adapt your strategy to meet their expectations.
And beyond that: this isn't changing one's personality.. it's adding an abstraction layer for the purpose of professionalism.
The job market is pretty tough at the moment and every job will have many qualified candidates applying.
I would not take this failure too much to heart. There will be quite a few other people who applied and also went all the way through the process only to be rejected at the end.
In these circumstances it can be very marginal things that sway the balance in favour or against one candidate.
Did you do practice interviews? I highly recommend doing pramp.com and/or paying for actual interview feedback.
Until you have someone with nothing to lose giving you brutally honest feedback, you won't know what the issue is. Years ago I had thought I passed technical interviews but I had given non optimal code.
I had one mock interviewer (paid) tell me I wasn't explaining my solutions enough and I needed to take charge of the conversation more.
Invest some time into finding out what your real weaknesses are.
When you find the right employer, your personality won't be a barrier, it'll be an asset. Wait for the right fit.
Do you. You're the only one who can do it as well as you do.
I mean, I don't disagree in principle but in practice I don't have years to spend waiting for the perfect job. I have decent savings so if I need to survive I can for awhile, but not forever.
Fair. To be more constructive in that case, I think you're trying to change the wrong thing. The last thing you should be changing is your personality. Look elsewhere.
I never do this. If I am hired then my personality comes along as part of the package. If the potential employer and coworkers reject my personality then the position is not a good match.
For what it is worth in my recent experience most interviewers have commented about how pleasant and likable I am before they reject me, usually for some perceived technical flaw such as not realizing the essence of software quality is embracing their favorite fuzzing solution.
I'm actually surprised that they gave you a reason. Usually I get some email like "while we were impressed by your skills and enjoyed talking to you, we do not believe that you're a good fit for CompanyX".
Treat it like a conversation with a mutual friend. You aren't close and dying of laugher but you have that familiarity with each other which lightens the mood.
They are a person after all.
You are looking at this from your perspective, which is either pass or fail.
From their perspective, they might be interviewing, say, six people. As you say, they've already weeded out people from their resumes before they even get to the interview. From my experience, and I have heard people note this before, interviews tend to be a Gaussian curve with a normal distribution. People are weeded out by resumes and such. However, if I interview six people, usually someone slips through the cracks who knows nothing or next to nothing. That leaves the remaining five.
Of the five, four are usually interchangeable. They're like you - they get the technical questions right, or right enough. It's obvious they've been writing features for code for a company like yours. But of the five, often one person seems to not just know the easiest questions, or normal questions, but has a very good understanding of the subject matter. You keep probing how much they know, and they have in-depth knowledge about a lot of things. They know how registers on a processor work, they know about cache, they know the big O space of various algorithms, they can explain different approaches to concurrency in depth, or testing, or a lot of things. So you got the answers right, they just did better.
It could be something else - you might be just as good as someone else, but they were recommended by someone already on the team, or on an adjacent team, and they get brought in.
I guess personalities are on a bell curve as well. Maybe one out of six people fail on this. Maybe they're disorganized, or immature, or arrogant. Sometimes they miss basic social cues, or don't follow instructions, or even seem like they have a screw loose. Then four out of six people seem nice enough - professional but friendly. Then maybe one out of six just seems very sharp and smart, or avuncular, or what have you. A lot of it ties together - someone who has done the work to learn a programming language more than the other candidates, you assume is going to be hard-working on features as well, and they also seem sharp because they know so much (about IT, but other things as well).
Some things are contrasting. The hard-working person who knows the programming language in and out, and who gets a lot of feature work done is probably willing to sacrifice a little comity within the group to get a feature out. On the other hand, some people are so stubborn and argumentative, their presence would be a negative, even if they have technical skills. But some personality traits can contrast - I've working with friendly, supportive leads with great technical skills, but if they are a little bit hard charging this type of thing might be expected to come with the package of being very good technically.
Take theater classes. Or join a (team) sports club. Both teach you skills that you most likely will not acquire elsewhere and that are directly applicable to interviews.
Also, having been on both sides, I can tell you that hiring is just a crap shoot. My (anecdotal!) experience is that a lot of hiring is e8ther 50% gut feelings-based or 50% keyword-based. And in the worse case, both.
Apparently my personality knob only has two settings: overly confident and small scared raccoon. Still trying to find the middle where humans live.
I’ve had many interview loops like this
I stay interviewing while I have a job so the consequences aren’t as large but over on cscareers and blind, many people have the same experience
I wouldn’t over think this from one employer
It's not just this one employer. It's been months and I've had pretty limited success. This has happened with dozens of employers and after a certain point I have to assume I'm doing something wrong.
okay, that’s pragmatic then, time to do mock interviews
Yep, definitely think that’s a pretty good idea.
My advice is 2 portions of Chivas Regal 4 hours before the interview and then 2 full bottles of The Famous Grouse and Blue Label, 15 minutes before. Then, let it flow. If they don't get that you are a good tech guy, move on, they don't deserve you.
Now, I've had a few strange things myself with interviews. Except for the company I ended work for, all other were a disaster. Everyone from HR knew 0 about Linux or programming. One guy was really dumb. We talked about bash for Linux and at the end he starts reading his notes and says "Sad you did not talk about scripting in Linux..." and I just went "Ok bye bye".
Oh I have a bunch of anecdotes about interviewers from BigCos that knew absolutely nothing about concurrent programming but thought that they knew a lot about concurrent programming and "corrected" my answers during the interview. There's a lot of confidently incorrect people at the staff level of big corporations, and it's a little concerning.
Before someone thinks I'm being cocky about me being right and them being wrong, after every interview involving concurrency I always write a PlusCal/TLA+ spec with my answer and use the model checker to make sure that my answer actually solved the problem correctly. This is why I can be confident that my answers were correct; I'm not smarter than anyone really, it's just that I try and verify my work.
You seem to have stumbled onto the secret of the Inebriati:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zmp_--Oow5o
Due to sleep apnea, I've avoided any alcohol for the last couple years.
I've never really had much of an issue saying what's on my mind, so I don't know that alcohol would really help me much, generally all alcohol does is make me louder and sleepy; according to my wife I don't really talk different when I'm drunk.
Have you tried asking them whey they didn't select you? If you express genuine disappointment and ask what it was about you that didn't fit what they were looking for, there's a reasonable chance they'll give you feedback on the interview.
In this particular case I actually have a phone call with the recruiter scheduled today to ask why they passed on me.
In general they don't tell me when I do ask though. I understand that; they don't want to risk me suing them if they divulge anything that could be even construed as illegal, I probably wouldn't give feedback either honestly.
What did they say?
Don’t badmouth people. People who badmouth someone else will badmouth you. Imagine the kind of person you’d want to work with (capable, calm, reliable) project the persona of the person you want to work with.
It’s ok not to lie. But you can also not say something about someone that you wouldn’t assay to them.
I interviewed someone once who was technically awesome and not a single person in the interview panel wanted to work with him.
Using a 3 pt impromptu speaking style of responding can help a lot. Many people ramble and aren't concise which can appear evasive.
Practicing public speaking can make you aware of your verbal tics - uhms ahs or saying "stuff" you use which can make you sound like you don't know what you're talking about.
Aggressively apply to jobs you don't want just for the interview practice. And study "good answers" to common questions on the internet ("strong points ? Weaknesses?" Fluff).
I do a fair amount of public speaking (I've spoken at Lambda Days six times, the Clojure Conj once), and I was a university lecturer, so that stuff isn't too hard for me.
I'm definitely guilty of rambling though; it's pretty hard for me to do say concisely. I'm not 100% sure of the best way to get better at that.
As an technical interviewer in a startup (50 people with like 20 devs), I think the culture fit and communication skills are more important than the pure technical skills.
Multiple times we rejected strong senior devs because of that. It could be things like: - language issues eg. we have to repeat questions multiple times - bad team players eg. they feel close minded, they seem judgemental
On the other hand, we recruited juniors who were not great technically but who had a positive mindset and the potential to grow. And I think they were the best people we hired.
Having integrity means not putting on an act. If you're trying too hard to please rather than be yourself, that comes across as dishonest and untrustworthy.
As it stands I don't really think I'm putting on an act during interviews. I am a very bad liar and if I lie people can tell almost immediately so generally I tend to be pretty brutally honest, and my personality more or less shines through there.
I don't really want to put on an act, I guess I'm asking for more "how do you present forward the more positive parts of your personality and quiet the bad parts during an interview?"
I acknowledge there is still some dishonesty in that, my personality is a package deal, good and bad, but I do think that most of my coworkers end up liking me after they get to know me.
It was for a different field, but I realised once I had run the interview process from the other side, I had a much better vocabulary and confidence answering related questions.
Perhaps setup a fake interview with a friend, really think about what you would ask from that position and dry run it a bit?
> It has really annoyed me; I ended up doing three interviews over the course of four weeks, and I'm pretty confident that I got the technical questions right. It could be that my resume is too "jumpy", which is fair, but they could have read my resume before they wasted my time and theirs with three multi-hour interviews.
If they're interviewing you, then it's likely that at least someone read your resume and decided that you were possibly a good enough fit to spend many hours of time talking to and debriefing about. It's more likely that you didn't provide enough good signals to hire in the interview.
The way to look at any interview is that it has to provide a signal to hire. Technical correctness is just one of those signals. It's an important one, but the other aspects are also important. Some things that will set you aside from other technical competent people:
- Tech is often a place where the interviewers are actually doing the job at a similar level to you rather than just being HR / Managers. Treat interviewers not as a gatekeeper to a job, but instead as a potential future peer. Start with the mindset of "Would I like to work with this person, and how can I convince them that they'd like to work with me". This reframes the interview as more of a collaborative effort to getting you that job than just a "solve the problems, tick the boxes" type thing.
- Learn / write / *practice out loud* a good way to introduce yourself. What's your 2 minute story, what drives you, why are you here? Interviewers often most recall the first and last things you said in an interview the most and perhaps one other moment. Looking at the first line of your hn bio "Eccentric math-enthusiast/wannabe-intellectual in NYC." has 3 words that hold at negative interpretations / no hire signals. Sometimes less is more here. In a recent interview, I had a longer 3 paragraph intro prepared, but the interviewer jumped in after the first and basically said something similar to "That's exactly my story, we need more people like that". I shut my mouth immediately on the rest of the intro because the connection bit was done.
- You mentioned in several comments below being corrected in interviews but knowing you're right. This really actually doesn't matter in many cases. These moments are perfect place for you to demonstrate humility and how you deal with feedback. These are key skills of a team player. What actually matters most is how you handle that interaction. Take that and use it to proved a signal to hire by acting like a colleague not a robot. Something as simple as "I hear you want to ..., let's dig deeper into that in case I've missed something in my approach." is the very basic part of this.
- Put yourself in the mindset of having gotten the job and started working in the job. What would that look like? How would you act? You often have a small amount of time at the beginning or end of an interview round to ask questions about the person's job, team, work environment. Ask questions that provide good signals and demonstrate that you're someone that they'd want to work with. E.g. ones about day to day activities, team interactions, culture, internal promotions, etc.
I'd recommend finding a way to get a software development manager friend or acquaintance to interview you and provide feedback. Reach out to your network and find someone that can give you honest advice (if you know other employed devs then you have second degree contacts). If you can't find this in your network, then consider paying for it (e.g. something like interviewing.io or hellointerview.com). The benefit of doing it with a friend is that you're much more relaxed about things and can take that same relaxation to the way you interview.
For most software development interviews you're going to have a system design and a behavioral round. Watch youtube videos about tech interviewing and system design (Hello Interview, . Spend time practicing using the tools that you might see in interviews (e.g. coderpad, excalidraw) so that you're not spending time learning the tooling and instead you can focus purely on the interview.
A few soft skills books worth reading are "How to Win Friends and Influence People" by Dale Carnegie, and "The Secrets to Consulting Success" by Gerald M Weinberg. They're not interviewing specific, but both have a bunch of things related to giving and taking advice (which is what we spend a lot of our time doing as software engineers).
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Something that you might consider trying is using a LLM to help you prepare (ChatGPT or your favorite local model). Vibe code your own interview personality coach.
First, set yourself up with a bunch of context: all the (mainly) non technical questions you've been asked in interviews, a copy of your resume, and any extra relevant info about yourself (your projects / goals / etc.), job roles and descriptions docs of jobs that you might want to do (find a bunch of these on big company websites). Ask the LLM for ideas for other context to add.
Then write your answers to the questions. Have the LLM analyze your tone, look for signals to hire, and suggest improvements to the way that you answer. Have the LLM come up with similar questions that might be asked and start practicing them. Have the LLM build a framework for answering that suits your approach. I like the CARL (Context, Action, Result, and Learning) approach over the more typical STAR (Situation, Task, Action, Result) as it provides more and better signals earlier in your response.
Use the LLM to meta-analyze the process ("come up with the top 10 reasons that software engineers fail in interviews for ... with ... context. Build a checklist of areas to analyze response"). If you have access to agentic tooling (e.g. Github copilot, Codex CLI, Claude Code), use it to build markdown summaries of things to look back on instead of leaving this info in your LLM chat history. Perhaps feed your blog posts and twitter history into the same checklist - you might find that the signals that you're putting out to the world have some glaring obvious problems that you're blind to because of your intimate familiarity, biases and assumptions.
I gotta admit that it saddens me a little to think that calling myself a "wannabe-intellectual" or "eccentric" would have any connotation other than very mild self-deprecation, but I suppose it won't hurt to make it simpler in the shorter term.
> This really actually doesn't matter in many cases. These moments are perfect place for you to demonstrate humility and how you deal with feedback.
That's decent enough advice, but when people confidently "correct" me with something that's actively wrong, it's always a bit jarring to me. It takes me a like thirty seconds to parse their feedback, read to make sure that my code isn't wrong, and then process that I need to somehow respond to it. It's difficult to know what to say at that point.
I dunno. This post has given me a lot to think about.
> I gotta admit that it saddens me a little to think that calling myself a "wannabe-intellectual" or "eccentric" would have any connotation other than very mild self-deprecation, but I suppose it won't hurt to make it simpler in the shorter term.
Don't stress on changing that too much - it's unlikely that an interviewer is going as deep as your hacker news profile. Eccentric can mean flaky and unreliable. Wannabe can mean aspiring but perpetually falling short. Neither put your best foot forward. I merely pointed that out as something that if you're generally seeing that view of your self then you might be presenting that outward.
A good way of looking at the interview process is that you want to give out as many strong-hire signals as possible. You need to find ways to turn no-hire signals into weak hire signals. (E.g. silly little things like "I don't have experience with that, but I've worked with ... where ...", or "I <did something that didn't work out> but <learnt> and <carried that learning to succeed in ...>", and you definitely want 0 no-hire signals.
> That's decent enough advice, but when people confidently "correct" me with something that's actively wrong, it's always a bit jarring to me.
Sounds a bit like you might need to expose yourself to be challenged by external viewpoints more often. Find an open source product to contribute some fixes to and see how the PRs go paying particular note about the communication aspects.
BTW, you might want to reconsider the domain that your GitHub profile currently points at.