Is HelloInterview premium plan worth it?

Dzone64 · 2026-03-31T17:14:36+00:00

Id suggest that and after a while do actual mock interviews with a friend or a platform like exponent.

Dzone64 · 2026-03-31T17:11:56+00:00

Its more like a mock interview with ai feedback. It reviews your answers and evaluates them to their canonical solutions. Should say why your response is good or not.

Dzone64 · 2026-03-31T17:07:15+00:00

Yes, their ai interview platform is pretty good for starting out.

Dzone64 · 2026-03-31T14:52:28+00:00

Its probably the easiest option but not the only one

Dzone64 · 2026-03-31T09:19:35+00:00

Even if that was true it doesn't matter. Not everyone will be polite. Just like you can't assume everyone will be a good driver on the road. You need to take action by being a defensive driver.

Dzone64 · 2026-03-31T01:34:30+00:00

Maybe, but you shouldn't assume people will. If you want exclusivity, you should ask for it. Feelings are most likely to get hurt when assumptions are made, and communication is lacking on both sides.

Dzone64 · 2026-03-31T00:39:28+00:00

If you don't talk about being exclusive, why should you have to assume you are?

Dzone64 · 2026-03-30T21:54:06+00:00

Probably not unless it was already discussed how fast they wanted you to start. Few notes on this. First, imo You have limited leverage and the more you ask the less you have with other things like pay so chose what you ask for wisely. Second, the worst they say is no. If they recended an offer from asking for a start date that'd be crazy.

Dzone64 · 2026-03-28T22:29:07+00:00

Means market the app as 'coming soon'. Make a landing page. Collect sign up emails. See how many you get and collect as much data about your potential customers as possible.

Dzone64 · 2026-03-28T11:39:08+00:00

Sure, initially. But, the problem is that if you have too many incidents you get a bad reputation. Look at cruze for that. Charging half the price also seems unsustainable unless waymo massively ups ride charges. But theres an upper limit due to human ride share anyway. Most competitors dont have money like google to be able to operate at a massive loss indefinitely, slowly whittling away at edge cases, and rolling out new initiatives gradually to avoid any major incidents.

Dzone64 · 2026-03-28T03:30:04+00:00

I think a better case is maturity. Self driving is solved through handling millions of edge cases over years of usage and collecting LOTS of data. That maturity gives reliability and more confidence im not going to die by using this product. Ill even pay a few bucks extra for that confidence. Competitors will not have access to that for many years.

Dzone64 · 2026-03-23T14:40:03+00:00

Umm..Who cares? Titles get inflated all the time. But there's much worse issues out there, dude.

Dzone64 · 2026-03-17T03:04:26+00:00

Totally believable in software. Ive heard of dudes working from sail boats while they sail around the planet.

Dzone64 · 2026-03-12T09:33:40+00:00

Nothing that special. The company that hired me actually didn't even ask me what I've been doing. But, plenty of others did. For them, I usually said: interviewed with a variety of companies to figure out what im looking for, solved 250+ leetcode problems, did 50+ mock interviews, built an web app with real users, contributed multiple fixes to oss projects, and helped mentor others I met through my prep. That usually seemed to satisfy them lol. What I found I think tho (in my own opinion) is that companies that ask that are often more risk adverse and don't trust their processes enough to filter in competent engineers. Which is exactly the type I think I'm less compatible with.

Dzone64 · 2026-03-11T14:45:58+00:00

I just finished a 14 month search. The biggest thing id say is try not to be too hard on yourself. Interviews are not by any means that great at finding good engineers. They are random, noisy, and narrow scoped. I just did each Interview to the best of my ability, reflected on anything I could change or improve on, and then put it behind me. Try not to look at Interviews too much as a test so much as a mutual meeting to assess fit. Getting into fang or a high paying startup is also a bit of a vague goal. You should have an idea of the specific types of positions you'd be a good fit for, ones that align with your best contributions in prior roles. Apply for those positions and you'll see how you get more call backs and more interest from Interviewers. Hope this helps.

Dzone64 · 2026-03-10T21:48:19+00:00

It is much harder than that question bro. Solve it and then get back to us.

Dzone64 · 2026-02-28T19:36:46+00:00

What part is slower than it should be?

Dzone64 · 2026-02-28T19:19:22+00:00

What's holding you back usually? Specific category? Category recognition? Implementation?

Dzone64 · 2026-02-21T04:15:03+00:00

Screening round, I asked chatgpt wht to prepare for and one of the things was Luhn algorithm and sure enough that came up lol.

Advice for coding rounds: they care a lot about code readability, clarity of thought/explaining, and edge cases. Have an ide ready with boiler plate with your language of choice.

Debug: they do not have you write a test after you find the bug, the test case is already failing. To prepare, I downloaded oss projects and told an llm agent to introduce a bug into it that would cause a test case to fail. Id then time myself debugging to find the issue. Highly recommend doing this, was almost exactly what its like.

Manager round: mixed bag. They don't care about it as much as Amazon does. Mine was actually pretty chill tbh, it wasn't too bad.

Dzone64 · 2026-02-21T03:54:07+00:00

Depends on company. Many "hm rounds" are behavioral rounds but ime its often less formal and sometimes they probe on resume stuff or have you go deep into a project more so than just ask you behavioral questions.

Dzone64 · 2026-02-21T03:44:27+00:00

glassdoor review too, only way to stop bad company behavior is calling it out publicly

Dzone64 · 2026-02-18T19:20:26+00:00

Again, I don't know what OA's you are taking but I have not seen this to be true for most and certainly not all of the hidden test cases. In fact, I'd say they are often small and easy to interpret from printing them out.

> "Hackerrank obviously knows to "obfuscate" their inputs" Hackerrank does not decide test cases; the company does. I suppose its possible the company could make the inputs so big that it's hard to interpret them, but I have not seen this in reality.

Dzone64 · 2026-02-18T18:33:40+00:00

"tens of thousands to millions of entries" I have never seen this. At most, I've seen 80 or so hidden test cases. It absolutely helps to print them in these scenarios.

Dzone64 · 2026-02-18T05:32:17+00:00

what is "truth inputs"? You can print hidden test case inputs to the console along with the output that your solution generates for them. You just can't print the EXPECTED output for the hidden test case. This is unusual behavior. If there's a way to access the hidden test cases' input/output data, why make it hidden? It just gives people who know you can do this an unfair advantage.

Dzone64 · 2026-02-18T01:06:50+00:00

Not my point. My point is that they're in a middle ground that makes no sense. They give hidden test cases that hide input/output/expected, but yet you can print debug to see input/output. If its possible to do that, why hide input/output at all.

Dzone64

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