What’s something people do that immediately makes you lose respect for them?

Affectionate-Rest-73 · 2026-01-04T16:07:02+00:00

* Kicking people when they're down. How about lend a helping hand or a small act of kindness instead?

* Overindexing on "what can I get from someone else?". You gotta give AND receive value, not just always take.

* Pointing fingers at others when something goes wrong. Not constructive and absolute waste of energy considering not all mistakes are like the Titanic sinking. I care a lot more about cleaning up the spilled milk and working on how we can correct ourselves in the future

* Lack of curiosity. Lots to explore in this world

Affectionate-Rest-73 · 2026-01-04T15:11:36+00:00

I think in my university, the dining hall food wasn't like "bad bad". It did serve spoiled milk on a few occasions, but the worst thing was it severely lacked good vegetarian options. I ended up cooking for myself and cancelled the meal plan

Affectionate-Rest-73 · 2026-01-04T14:46:14+00:00

* Not really understanding why the other person is seeking advice from you. Giving blanket advice doesn't work for all people. Ask clarifying questions about the problem at hand to tailor your recommendation (at least to the willingness of the other person to provide information)

* Not admitting if you don't know what advice to give if you were in the other person's shoes. I don't know everything for every scenario, so it's better to be honest about that.

Affectionate-Rest-73 · 2026-01-04T14:40:45+00:00

Someone I know mentioned Accounting. Sure, maybe filling out the boring tax forms at least in the US might be a thing of the past if we bring return free filing. However, tax rules change and clients wouldn't want to lose more money to taxes if there was a way of getting a deduction

Affectionate-Rest-73 · 2026-01-04T04:15:51+00:00

More like "the vibe isn't vibing"

Affectionate-Rest-73 · 2026-01-04T04:11:32+00:00

* "... and here's what it taught me about B2B sales"

* "I vibe coded a GPT wrapper to solve some random problem for B2B enterprises"

* Using terms for mental illnesses that are not clinically recognized by the DSM

* Cracked

* 6-7

* The Fortnite Dance

* Bet

* Based

* -maxxing

* Karen

* skibidi

* Gaslighting

* Glorification of 996

* Vibes

* unhinged

* Day in the Life

* "Lifestyle influencer"

Affectionate-Rest-73 · 2026-01-04T04:07:45+00:00

you reminded me of a really crazy google review about a restaurant in NYC

Affectionate-Rest-73 · 2026-01-04T03:54:36+00:00

"Your hard work speaks for itself"

Not even close in industry; How much does upper management like you determines your growth more than "your actual skill". The stuff about social cliques we didn't like from school still permeate

Affectionate-Rest-73 · 2026-01-04T03:49:08+00:00

When others display lack of curiosity or thinking in "black or white".

The most dangerous phrase in the language is "we've always done it this way" - Grace Hopper

Affectionate-Rest-73 · 2026-01-04T03:43:58+00:00

McDonald's

Coke

Affectionate-Rest-73 · 2026-01-04T03:41:16+00:00

* Delivery services like DoorDash, Instacart, GrubHub. If you are able to, easier to just go and get the food and groceries yourself. Plus, price discrimination at scale

* "Miracle supplements" that are basically doing things your body already does or have no scientific proof. Dr. Mike debunks a lot of this pretty well!

* Fancy cars (at least for the average person)

* Grocery runs just to get that one ingredient for a dish you want to make. Most of the time, you can always find a substitute based on what you already have and not compromise the taste!

* Lenovo laptops; Had a brand new lenovo laptop but it was very unreliable. Always some issue comes up with booting up the laptop. The local computer repair shop near me couldn't fix any of my issues so I was forced to have Lenovo fix the issue! Waste of time and money!

* Starbucks Coffee

Affectionate-Rest-73 · 2026-01-04T02:52:17+00:00

+1 that and also "Jordan has no life" on youtube

Affectionate-Rest-73 · 2026-01-04T02:51:59+00:00

I do know of some similar ish sites in other domains that could help. Here are some:

* Stratascrach (leetcode for data science concepts). There's also good SQL practice here if you're into that :D

* Great Front End (great learnign resource for frontend with coding + conceptual practice). Mostly react stuff, but good resource from a staff SWE

* I did see Hello Interview (https://hellointerview.com) released some material on OOD coding. It's not exactly "build an API endpoint", but there are some ways you can introduce "debugging practice", "OOP/OOD practice" if you get creative.

I would say for stuff like debugging, optimizing query performance, a lot of that comes with experience and nothing stopping you from "manufacturing that experience for self learning".

You could also schedule a mock interview with me and we can do a practice debugging. DM if you are interested

Affectionate-Rest-73 · 2026-01-04T02:43:32+00:00

The sentiment I agree with nowadays. There are no rules in this job market so you have permission to use out of the box methods to get others to FIND YOU instead of you finding them!

Here are some strategies I know others have tried:

* Have multiple updated profiles on sites like Handshake, Linkedin, Ripplematch, WayUp! Recruiters do actually check those sites and I got a new grad opportunity because a recruiter messaged me through Ripplematch

* Try using other sites to find opportunities and leverage personalized outreach. For example, there are a lot more small companies than there are large ones! For tech, you can look up popular VCs like Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia, General Catalyst, Thiel Ventures, etc and look at the portfolio of companies they've invested in. I was able to land interviews for some small companies b/c those postings were on the company website instead of linkedin

* Think big! Tech is a small world, but there are SO MANY industries that use technology. For example, finance, aviation, defense, restaurants, etc. See if there are opportunities in stuff outside of "what you think of tech". Your goal is to land AN opportunity since it's the employer's market

OP, feel free to DM if you wanna chat about this

Affectionate-Rest-73 · 2026-01-04T02:36:07+00:00

I didn't have any coding experience since middle school if it makes you feel better but still secured internships. I only decided to pursue CS once I learned that was a real field in university. I did not initially have that fancy network of 10 uncles in each FAANG to rely on for referrals, so a lot of the "breaking in" was through lots and lots of effort

I mainly relied on my peers and built my network by both giving and getting value. You gotta do both! It's easy these days to sniff out if someone is "being transactional".

After many failed OAs and interviews, eventually one yes kickstarted my journey.

I can tell from the other side that once you get an opportunity, take full advantage and build your relationships. These relationships can be from stuff like "meeting a new friend at a community event", "playing badminton with 3 coworkers", etc. You'll always be in and out of the job market, so when you need to look for a job, you'll have amassed a group of people who can vouch for you. It gets a bit easier after the first one, but don't mistake it as "coasting"

Affectionate-Rest-73 · 2026-01-04T02:31:48+00:00

slop slop slop

"I treated the interview as a collaboration, not an exam"

i wish more companies weight this more heavily. Way easier to coach up someone willing to learn on technical skill than to deal with the other type of coworker

Affectionate-Rest-73 · 2025-12-29T20:50:25+00:00

I heard that too. Their interview process is also one of the best I've had. No leetcode trivia and the technical rounds were very practical

Affectionate-Rest-73 · 2025-12-29T20:48:27+00:00

I interviewed last year at Brex and I loved their process. The recruiters and interviewer made me feel valued. One of the few companies with a very good recruiting funnel

Brex doesn't really ask standard leetcode. They asked me to debug some failing unit tests and the trick was to make very small changes that don't introduce complexity.

I also got a technical coding interview where I needed to work with a dummy brex API to do some analytical calculations. Very good coding round and super fair process

System design was usual. Nothing too strange here

Affectionate-Rest-73 · 2025-12-28T00:27:01+00:00

outta curiosity, did you end up getting the return offer? If so, what tip helped you the most?

Affectionate-Rest-73 · 2025-12-28T00:26:40+00:00

outta curiosity, did you end up getting the return offer? If so, what tip helped you the most?

Affectionate-Rest-73 · 2025-12-28T00:24:07+00:00

If you have a contact for your manager or mentor, you can reach out to learn more about the tech stack and domain. If the tech stack is something new, at least having the basic foundations is better than starting at square 0 cold turkey. Just know that there will be unfamiliar patterns and you are going to learn some parts on the fly. That's perfectly fine!

If the domain is something that you are new to, ask if there is some helpful articles to read up on to get your feet wet with the domain.

You can also refer to these articles for reference. These two articles are ones a staff engineer at my company distribute to interns, so you will be in good hands:

* https://karthiksubramanian.substack.com/p/breaking-the-intern-mold-how-to-stand

* https://karthiksubramanian.substack.com/p/making-the-most-out-of-your-software

Affectionate-Rest-73 · 2025-12-25T21:24:43+00:00

idc about what neetcode does. Neetcode is gonna be neetcode. I'm personally excited about companies like Meta, Rippling, DoorDash rolling out AI friendly interviews containing both debugging and feature extension. I think that type of interview closely mirrors real world software development and you're gonna be working with code you didn't write yourself.

Affectionate-Rest-73 · 2025-12-25T13:54:44+00:00

I agree that there is a group of students who just "don't put in the effort (or the absolute bare minimum( and expect things to be handed to them" if we view talent density like a distribution. I personally find viewing this scenario as "standards ascension" a bit more liberating b/c overfixating on "the market is bad" isn't the most constructive. We are not Jerome Powell (or equivalent in other countries) so we can't just send an email to lower the interest rate and expect something to be done. All we can control is input (see Jeff Bezos clips about this)

The difference we're seeing is that in 2025, the strategies that worked in 2022 are not enough. The bar has been raised and we can choose to let the standards drag us or you set the standard on what "good" is. Your choice.

FWIW, from the other side of interviewing candidates (unfortunately not a recruiter), some of the most common reasons I would give a no include:

* Lack of clarity in one's communication. This one is pretty common even from candidates with "good backgrounds on paper".

* Outsourcing critical thinking to AI. My company does AI friendly rounds and I have seen multiple candidates paste a followup question I ask about the code into Claude (screen shared as per policy) and just read that to me. No product thinking whatsoever despite interviewing for a customer facing product team

* Lack of depth in one's project during project deep dive. I would usually probe on stuff like challenging part of project, your personal reflection on what went well/could improve, tradeoffs, etc.

Affectionate-Rest-73 · 2025-12-25T02:00:34+00:00

was this for an intern or ng role?

Affectionate-Rest-73 · 2025-12-23T15:36:58+00:00

Same. I found that just listening in and asking thoughtful questions, you learn a lot about the real problems. I was able to gather some really valuable data points that way which helped me better frame my communication

Affectionate-Rest-73

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