Interviews are hard for everyone

career
interviews
The fundamental takeaways from this markdown article are the importance of perseverance, understanding that success often involves numerous failures, and the misconception of “overnight successes”.
Author

Lucas A. Meyer

Published

June 21, 2021

I am bad at being at the “job seeker” side of the table in interviews.

I’m usually very nervous. I ramble. I make mistakes, I don’t do eye contact, especially on video. I once had a sweat attack in an interview.

I answer questions without thinking why the question was asked. I don’t always comment my code. I don’t always break the problem in smaller parts.

For every job I got, I failed to get at least the same number of jobs. I flunked interviews that were supposed to be easy. I lucked out in some interviews that were supposed to be hard.

When you look at someone’s successes in social networks, remember that you’re only seeing the numerator. You don’t know the denominator. In my case, it took a lot of tries.

It’s hard for me to tell you what will work in your situation, but for most people I know, it took many tries. Most “overnight successes” actually had many years of preparation.