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.

The posts on LinkedIn should probably go too.

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.

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.

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.

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>

Occasionally I shed a username and start a new one.

The admins here seem not to mind as long as I'm not voting more than once or ban evading, and the same goes for most sites.

I used to be really into comedy -- it's perfectly possible to have a persona that doesn't tie back to you, but you need to be diligent -- separate email, phone number etc.

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.

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".

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.

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.

It's awful. I think the best thing is maybe a fake profile you touch once a year.

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.

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.

It's probably still better overall to have no social media compared to social media with edgy takes.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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,

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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".

Mock interviews are a pretty good idea though.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I've had the opposite problem -- folks would like me as a person, but point to things to beef up on my CV so they could hire me. (Eg: I used to really have an aversion to programming, which is more common than you'd think in pentesting, and now I can point to several languages and small projects/tools I've done.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I was a little upset when I created the Ask HN, because I was pretty convinced that I was going to get this job and accidentally started getting preemptively excited. I try not to count my eggs before they hatch, but sometimes that's easier said than done. Easy to get into your own head and hate yourself a little when you feel rejected and frustrated.

My wife (who is awesome and supportive and cool) gave me a bit of a pep talk and it actually did make me feel better and I'm more or less alright now.

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.

Do you. You're the only one who can do it as well as you do.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Perhaps setup a fake interview with a friend, really think about what you would ask from that position and dry run it a bit?

They are a person after all.

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

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".

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zmp_--Oow5o

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.

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.

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.

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'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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.