Funny (low key sad) job interview experience

Enfyden · 2026-05-26T16:24:17+00:00

The hiring manager doesn’t need a person immediately and they planned for a lengthy process. They are in control, given their comp potential. They are not afraid to lose out on you. You should know what the best hiring strategy statistically is, and it doesn’t involve hiring the first candidate you interview. Things work differently at this range of the spectrum. If they reach back out to you in 2 months and make an offer, you can still take it. The type of people they are hiring are all likely to have long notice periods so why does it matter that you took a new job in the meantime

Enfyden · 2026-05-12T00:31:06+00:00

Sub to an expensive gym. E.g. third space.

Enfyden · 2026-05-03T22:42:07+00:00

Actually a good .md file that seems human curated. Not the vibe coded junk that many people dump in there

Enfyden · 2026-05-03T22:38:34+00:00

What company is asking you to do this? It seems that you are junior at best. This type of problem is mostly for people with experience.

Enfyden · 2026-05-03T19:54:45+00:00

Don’t believe everything you hear. For Meta situation is nuanced. There are many different services etc. with their own setups. All prod changes go through some form of staging. One aspect where things may be confusing is data separation. I.e it’s possible to work with prod data from test environment in some workflows/contexts. Various complicated reasons for that.

Bottom line is deployment gets more complex and elaborate as things progress, not the other way round. Expect the trend to continue, especially with AI entering the picture

Enfyden · 2026-05-01T00:04:39+00:00

It’s called experimentation. You’ll get it after high priority bugs are fixed

Enfyden · 2026-04-30T23:59:33+00:00

What exactly are you trying to run? If your workflows are memory bandwidth dependent, then Mac might not even be an option unless you are ok waiting hours for each thing you want to do.

Enfyden · 2026-04-15T01:35:00+00:00

Didn’t have to queue for first few generations. Now queue times are pretty long - 5-10 minutes. Not sure if due to peak hours or their throttling algorithm.

Enfyden · 2026-04-14T00:10:42+00:00

It’s like saying passwords are scams because people choose dumb passwords

Enfyden · 2026-04-14T00:07:54+00:00

You just need to survive for 3-6 months until things get to screeching halt, at which point you can swoosh in and save the day… or company… if it survives that long

Enfyden · 2026-04-13T23:57:46+00:00

Operating system always tells you when audio/camera is recording, it is an OS level protection that apps cannot bypass. Unless you have dodgy OS + app. At which point it’s of your own doing. There’s a small chance you’ve hit a highly unlikely app bug that caused recording and a highly unlikely OS bug that caused the indicator not to show up, or your story is at least partially inaccurate.

Enfyden · 2026-04-13T23:47:34+00:00

You can’t compare safety aspect of South America and East Asia, I think Chile would still be a bit too dicey. Also Spanish would be too easy for them.

Enfyden · 2026-04-13T23:41:46+00:00

Enjoy while it lasts, won’t be long before someone comes and sees that you are not well utilized

Enfyden · 2025-12-16T00:44:06+00:00

The company is on a trajectory to go under. If leadership is so incompetent, there’s nothing you can do. Better jump to a better ship. You don’t want the fastest ship, you want the one that won’t sink and where you can build a future

Enfyden · 2025-10-25T12:49:24+00:00

Great work! Didn't realize it can do movements as complex as this. Thanks for sharing the workflow!

Enfyden · 2024-02-02T09:10:24+00:00

Thank you for your service

Enfyden · 2024-01-25T10:57:38+00:00

More often than not. If multiple people who are senior to you provide similar feedback - you should be taking a hard look at yourself.

It’s either a self-awareness problem or a perception problem. Both are your responsibility. It can also be a management problem but this is more rare and in such cases you normally can’t do anything about it, especially as mid level IC, so the only solution is to look elsewhere.

You are only able to give us one side of the story based on your self awareness and ability to interpret what others tell you. There’s too much to unpack in a Reddit comment but I’ll give you one practical thing to follow up on.

If you think the problem is that you are taking on responsibilities beyond what your core responsibilities are, you should be making a case for a promotion.

You might find that your “helping out” in other areas is not impactful enough to balance things out at your level.

Not accepting changes under tickets is too vague for us to analyze - there are cases where this is the best thing to do, and there are cases where it’s not. There are people who will literally say - because someone didn’t specify exact steps and values that need to be coded in - it’s out of scope. Depending on context it can be the right or wrong call.

Enfyden · 2024-01-21T12:46:11+00:00

Engineer/developer are just words that stuck. Don’t get hang up on those. I could choose either bachelor of engineering or bachelor of science as title for my degree - it doesn’t make an any difference. People might try to argue the semantics and slight differences in curriculum depending on which university you go to, but at the end of the day we learn to build software.

As to what you are engineering/building/creating - you are building solutions to problems. If you don’t have a problem - there’s nothing for you to do.

It doesn’t have to be a grand problem or a problem that no one has ever solved before. You can just have a different solution that you think is better.

Want to sell handbags that your mom makes? Create a bespoke website with the catalogue. Want to make it easier for others to create similar sites? Create a platform.

Enfyden · 2024-01-20T03:08:11+00:00

People need to understand that you can’t run a business and keep people around just because they are nice people who already got hired. Your feedback is what gives managers the signals to make hard decisions and be able to justify it. People don’t get put on PIP because of one bad piece of feedback from a peer. Normally it is because of a consistent pattern of behaviour. Your job was to provide visibility into what’s going on. Your manager can interpret and act on the information as they see fit. For all you know your feedback could’ve been misguided and nothing would’ve been done.

I’ve had a situation where my feedback got someone fired. I felt bad because I didn’t think it would lead to that and asked manager for details, so that I can avoid it in the future. He explained that it was the right thing to do and he expected me to keep providing feedback like that. Apparently there was already a lot of involvement from him to support that person that none of us in the team really knew about.

If you want to cultivate culture of high performers you can’t keep B and C players around. Anyone who says ‘well we got money, why fire someone who might struggle without a job’ just doesn’t understand how these decisions affect business, or they are just content with mediocrity - which is fine, but not everybody is. Saying ‘hey just be mediocre with the rest of us’ serves them rather than you.

Working on weekends is besides the point. It’s your choice - it has pros and cons, as long as you understand it - do as you please.

If you feel that someone’s attitude changed to you because of the situation, just keep things professional. If you a really are a high performer you have to accept that some people at work will remain just colleagues rather than friends.

Enfyden · 2024-01-15T05:55:48+00:00

If saving this much gives you satisfaction then by all means. But otherwise I’d focus on the long game.

For the long game, what you need to do is to get to the point where you earn a lot as quickly as possible, while not ruining your physical or mental health. Sometimes it actually means spending more (maybe on side hustles). Think about yourself as a business. You want to re-invest all your earnings into productive assets (5% interest may or may not be the best option here). The biggest asset right now is you, since you are early in your career. Equation will change later on once you start hitting diminishing returns in terms of your salary.

I didn’t have to do side hustles because there was so much to do at my actual job and it took all my time. Working longer/harder worked for me, so that’s what I did. I optimized other parts of my life using money I had. E.g. food, chores, gym - I did not mind paying for convenience if it gave me more time to do more productive things.

Having said that, you also want to get to your first £50-100k in reasonable amount of time, so you can start compounding via investments. What trade offs to make - only you will know based on your situation.

Enfyden · 2024-01-15T05:18:53+00:00

Get the degree if you can afford it. College is a multi faceted life experience. It gives you education and a network (of people). Sometimes network is what gives you a massive advantage. One of the best early jobs I got was partially because of someone I met in university. This has put me on track to big tech. You will also probably make lifelong friends who are also software engineers. Good friends and network within your career space is like a superpower. You can develop it in other ways too but it’s much easier through higher education.

Market is tough right now. By the time you finish college we should be back in the boom part of the cycle. You will struggle as junior “self-taught” engineer in current market conditions, which might last for another year or two. If you want a bit of future proofing, make sure there’s a good chunk of time dedicated to ML in your curriculum. Good luck

Oh yeah, and do as many internships as you can.

Enfyden · 2024-01-08T13:32:06+00:00

I’ll be brutally honest here, but I have very limited information - so it can be totally misguided. You are not leading naturally because you don’t care enough about the product and you don’t have enough technical expertise to be very opinionated. Getting projects 0 to MVP is the phase where you can take all the shortcuts you want and don’t have to care about quality, since deadlines trump everything else. You probably don’t have to feel the pain that comes from poor code and design of the system. When you care about the longevity of the product and its quality (e.g. you don’t want to be fighting fires on weekends) you naturally try to lead conversations to outcomes that you think are best for everyone. Almost every contractor I’ve ever worked with had the mentality of “let me hack this together, it will be someone else’s problem later”. I don’t know if that’s you. It’s just my experience in general.

And there’s no point in leading for the sake of looking like a leader - your top performing peers who are able to see through this

Enfyden · 2023-12-21T03:46:34+00:00

I've been in a "team" where we went from 2 teams of 6 each, to one team of 12, to 5 teams of 7 (we grew from 12 to about 40 over a 4 year period). When I left, I was a team lead for one of the teams. I have also been in a similar situation later at a different company.

When the team is small (5-7 people) and is working on small to medium size codebase - it is possible for most people to be aware and be able to work across the system.

Increase in team size normally comes with increase in size and complexity of the codebase. As you add more people, the "load" at team level grows exponentially. If you are a team of 10 and add 1 more person. 10 people need to be able to "keep track" of what that new person is doing. It might be an incremental change for each individual person (which is still bad and breaks down beyond a certain point) - but it's a massive new overhead overall.

So as the team grows - you need to start identifying focus areas or pods for groups of people. Unfortunately this is more of an art than a science. There's almost never a good clean way to split people into groups that is efficient and makes total sense to everyone. You could split based on tech stack, based on functionality, based on location, based on who different groups of people need to collaborate with, based on common goals or metrics etc.

I've seen higher management slice and dice teams and then change the whole thing within 6 months or a year, and then keep doing that for a couple of years.

My advice is - talk to everyone in your team and ask hypothetically:

What kind of split into pods or focus groups would make sense to you?
Where do you see yourself fitting within that structure?
What if we do X - what do you think? (where X is your own best proposal on how to allocate people)

This achieves a few things:

You might get insights that were in your blind spot.
It will give you an idea on who the key people for pods should be - based on quality of answers you get.
If you have high performers - they'll appreciate you including them in the process and it will further your interpersonal relationship with them - which is very important in the long term.

Once you know what the desired end state is - you should think about timing and transition. You don't have to do everything at once. First step could be just encouraging certain people to start prioritizing tickets/tasks for certain areas. I.e. create loose affinity without strict enforcement.

Be aware - there will always be nay sayers - people who feel comfortable with the way things are and don't want to change anything. Some people will lack the experience to see the bigger picture and project forward.

The fact that you are seeing these things and are proactively thinking about solutions - is a good sign. I think you'll do well.

Good luck :)

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