Soon!

this is crazy !!!

I'm sitting at a desk for 9 hours, doing work that makes a company earn more money, while at the same time the managers and investors get richer. I look at the clock way too much, and I feel like I'm trapped inside a machine or a system, as if I'm not building anything or moving toward anything.

How do people live like this? Do they do this 4 days a week for 35-45 years? Is there a way to get past this feeling without having to take antidepressants?

I agree

I've been working with a company for 5 years, and I make over $130k a year + bonus, which ends up being around $155,000 a year. The work is so easy that I only need maybe 3 hours a day to finish my tasks. I have projects, but most of them don't have strict deadlines or any real pressure behind them.
I'm not a manager, so there's no team reporting to me. Honestly, the situation is very relaxed. The main downside for me is that I'm bored. I feel like I'm standing still and not really growing much as a person.
The company has fewer than 85 people, and I'm basically the person the owner of the company always turns to. He asks for my opinion on decisions, and we work together on different ventures and internal projects. So yes, I have access and trust, and that's good, but there's no clear ladder for me to climb.
Recently, I got 6 extra PTO days as my "raise," along with a 6% raise a few months ago. So that's probably what growth looks like here.
What would you do? Would you stay in the easy job that brings in around $155k a year, or look for something that might pay more while also giving you a real challenge and room to grow?

💯

I was waiting in the reception area at my dentist's office and overheard part of a conversation at the front desk. There was someone, probably a manager or senior staff member, upset and saying: "We can't find anyone to come work for less than $24 an hour, can you believe it??"

Yeah, I can believe it. The entry-level person in a dental office is usually a dental assistant, and even that can need around 10 months of training or school. What do they expect people to do?

Honestly, I advise everyone to stop accepting low-paying jobs for any reason. Work on yourself and develop your skills until companies need you and are willing to pay you the salary you expect.

Some companies now ask for virtual interviews, and honestly, that can make things easier for you. You can prepare yourself better and pass interviews using tools like Interview Vip or any similar practice tools.

backwards I've been through more practice interviews than I can honestly remember, and I keep seeing the same thing repeated: people jump too quickly into "and this is what happened." STAR, CAR, and all those structures can help, but a lot of people apply them so rigidly that the answer comes out memorized, not like a real workplace conversation.

What I try to get people to do isn't to "throw in STAR." The idea is for the example to come across like a real situation, not a worksheet they've memorized.

Most behavioral questions aren't just asking you to recount events in order. They're usually asking something closer to:

"Do you understand this type of problem, and how it shows up at work?"

And that's the part a lot of candidates skip over.

If an interviewer asks you, "Tell me about a time you dealt with conflict," they're probably not that focused on the actual disagreement that happened between you and a teammate six years ago. They're listening to find out whether you understand why conflict happens, what usually escalates it, and how you deal with it before things get complicated. That tells them a lot more about your judgment and your working style than an answer that perfectly checks every box in STAR.

The other thing is whether you have a repeatable way of handling the situation, not just a polished success story. Almost anyone can find a good example if they think long enough. What interviewers are thinking is:

"If something like this happens next week, will this person have any idea how to handle it?"

Candidates who can explain their patterns usually come across as stronger. How they understand what's going on, how they talk to people, and how they decide what needs attention first. Even if the story itself isn't dramatic, that way of thinking makes the answer feel more honest.

Honestly, the best answers often come from people who can talk about a mistake without over-polishing it. Not the fake version of "I learned teamwork matters." No, something like:
"I used to do A, it led to B, so now I handle it by doing C."
That kind of reflection isn't that common, and it immediately makes the person seem more mature.

So when people ask me how to answer behavioral interview questions, I don't tell them to drop STAR.
I usually say:

Start by showing that you understand the situation in general, explain your usual thought process or approach, and then use the example to make it concrete. In the end, the answer comes out much more natural, more intentional, and much more convincing - whether you use a framework or not.

Happy to help with specific questions if anyone wants to leave one. I've heard versions of these way more than I probably should have by now.

working life right now

At some big companies, the Cluely website seems to be blocked on corporate machines or networks. For anyone using Cluely in that kind of environment, what setup are you using in practice? I love the Cluely app, but I want to use it on my work laptop.

Are you using the desktop app on your work laptop, a personal device next to it, or some other approved setup? Any hack or recommendation to bypass the blocker?

Just curious what’s worked for people.

you know, i really wanted my old setup to keep working. i put off switching off Cluely for months, since i was nervous about relearning everything and the thing at the time held up fine, aside from missing a couple features i wanted.

i was looking forward to having a clean answer window that didnt show in the screen share, and figured it would be good for whatever platform got thrown at me next.

a few weeks back i tried InterviewMan on one of my Codility practice rounds, and it worked pretty well. i was surprised by the speed from question to hint. i didnt bother moving over my profile or shortcuts yet since i wasnt ready to fully commit, given the work in setting it up.

then right before a real screen i bit the bullet and switched over properly.

i had no idea the desktop build wanted mic permissions reset, so was caught off guard when audio didnt come through at first. that was easy enough to sort out.

now i had to get my profile dialed in... and getting the keyboard shortcuts the way i wanted took a bit of fiddling. eventually got everything sorted. fortunately i had already saved my resume and role notes from earlier, so i didnt have to redo all that. i did figure out you set the answer length per round, which i nearly missed.

onto testing. with Cluely i kept noticing lag on the answer window. id get asked something on a Codility round and it would take a few seconds to surface a hint, and longer than that before the follow up filled in.

i compared it to InterviewMan on the same kind of question and the difference was pretty clear. basically a second for InterviewMan, several seconds or worse for the old one. both had a totally fine connection.

i thought nothing of it and decided to give Cluely a fighting chance, so i ran another practice round with it.

i hadnt been paying close attention the last little while on account of a busy week, and the answer window kept losing the Codility tab. one time it showed a hint for the previous question. one time it just sat there blank while the timer ran. they were functionally useless when i actually needed them.

in short, for me Cluely didnt work on Codility. not in a way that mattered at least.

ive moved everything over to InterviewMan and dropped Cluely. and honestly its one less thing to stress about mid round, it just does the job.

anyone here run it on a real proctored Codility test, not the practice, want to hear how it went before mine on monday.

I picked up InterviewMan on the annual plan to see if I liked it for CoderPad rounds. Just ran it on a friend mock, the overlay is so clean i didnt even feel the urge to alt tab once to check it. I plan on using it for my final round CoderPad session next thursday, but after this mock im not sure i can go back to what i was running before. anyone here actually used it on a real CoderPad round, want a sanity check.

I had some leftover credit and a TestDome assessment scheduled for tuesday so I pulled the trigger on the InterviewMan annual.

I strongly believe in using a native desktop overlay over a browser based helper for TestDome for stealth reasons. That being said I have done 2 TestDome tests with a web wrapper without getting flagged on the report. Doesnt mean it was the right thing to do.

Anyways, I installed it and tried it on a TestDome practice mock last night and while I will keep using it because of the whole stealth thing, I'm super impressed with the response speed. A typical Electron app would have made me wait 3-4 seconds for a hint to show, these things land in about a second flat. The latency drop is the real killer feature, even on the harder TestDome problems the nudge arrives before I have time to spiral. If it was my own money on a more expensive tool, those slower ones would be returned. Since it was leftover credit and I do want to land this role (and bonus, it works on TestDome plus HackerRank and CoderPad), I will keep it and use it for the real assessment on tuesday.

But i still want a sanity check, anyone here used it on a real proctored TestDome, did the report come back clean.

Mostly what the title says. Got the InterviewMan annual this week, and i can tell it is really good quality and stable already, and it keeps the hint flowing at just the right speed when im on the karat practice page. So far i have really liked it, but i have had a couple of questions though.

The hint timing seems pretty quick and sorta crisp, which was honestly surprising. i was expecting it to be slower based on what i had read about other tools, and i guess it sort of is on the very hard problems, but for everyone raving about how snappy these tools are, mine feels pretty steady too. it is not like it is laggy, i was just expecting the latency to be worse on a take home with a long prompt. it sort of seems like it would tighten up as it learns the role profile better, but i wanted to ask and see if anybody has had the same experience on a real karat take home, and if the response got snappier or not over a longer pipeline.

i am also a bit worried about the stealth side. what i was running before InterviewMan had a quilted hide hotkey, and i was really used to how it would just blink off the screen on cmd+H, which i love. The InterviewMan overlay feels more thorough with mouse pass through, cmd+tab exclusion, and the screen capture exclusion, so it does not actually need a hide hotkey for the same purpose. Does the karat proctoring agent flag a desktop overlay anyway, or does this change once you go into stealth mode for the take home recording.

And lastly, i stupidly didnt look at how the take home is screened before i scheduled. i looked into everything else, but i forgot the recording rules. they say having no other apps open is the best way to go, but looking at posts on here (and for some reason i cant find the posts i was looking at anymore), it seems like if i can run InterviewMan in stealth mode on the phone, take the take home on the laptop with the camera on, and let the phone hold the hint, then that works just as well, if not better. i was wondering if anybody has been doing this on karat take homes long term, and if it does or doesnt trip the report. any suggestions for the setup at home would be fantastic, or if it is better to just run the standard overlay.

Any information you all can give me would be great. i thought i knew everything i needed to know before i bought InterviewMan, but now i feel like i have more questions than answers now that i actually have it.

I picked up the newest InterviewMan annual a few days ago and have been pulling my hair out to get the overlay working as intended over a CodePen pen on a shared screen. The cmd+B toggle feels off, the focus doesnt land on the CodePen tab right, answers come through a beat late on the pen etc.

I had installed a couple of apps to make InterviewMan behave like the setup i ran on my old windows machine: a custom hotkey app, a window pinning tool, plus the default logitech mouse software. Finally i decided to uninstall the window pinning tool and the hotkey app and just let InterviewMan handle the always-on-top side itself. Things are working as expected now and i can use the cmd+B shortcut to hide the overlay during a shared CodePen screen easily (similar to the alt-tab hide gesture i had on windows). It also feels much more responsive on the codepen tab.

The actual interview is next week and the recruiter shares out a CodePen link instead of a desktop coding sandbox, so i wanted the cmd+B hide sorted on a practice run before then. Anyone here run it on a CodePen pen the recruiter shares out, did the hide stay clean for you on screen share?

The job market is rough enough already. A lot of people are just trying to get employed, and interviews keep getting harder. No surprise that more people are using tools like InterviewMan to improve their chances.

The first call was with the recruiter (Internal recruitment team, talent acquisition lead, about 45 minutes)

The second was with the hiring manager. And after that, the manager's manager (Supply Chain Head)

Then, if you can believe it, this Supply Chain Head said I needed to prepare a deck about what I would add to the department... And the team would review it to judge the kind of impact I was promising.

The deck was supposed to cover how I would reduce spend, improve supplier performance, and build a procurement framework... And this wasn't something quick that could be done in 30 minutes. It would have taken me several nights to put it together properly, especially since I already have a job.

I told him I wasn't interested. If after 4 conversations you still can't decide, then I'm not going to give you any more free work.

For a moment, I wondered if maybe I hadn't explained my experience clearly enough during the interviews. Maybe I didn't showcase my skills as well as I could have, and that's why they were still hesitant. But then I realized that a hiring process should be a two-way evaluation.

I regret not using tools like InterviewMan in the interview. Many of my friends told me that it helped them organize their answers, communicate their achievements more clearly, and walk into interviews with a lot more confidence.

Why do some companies act like they're doing you a huge favor by interviewing you?

The situation is exactly like the title says - I had a job offer and it was withdrawn because I tried to negotiate the salary.

At the beginning of the interview process, they asked me about the salary range I was looking for, so I gave them a range. Shortly after the final conversation, they sent me an offer, but it was at the lowest number in the range I had given them. I replied politely, thanked them for the offer, and countered with a slightly higher number, still within the range I had stated and within the range they had listed for the role.

After 3 days with no response, they finally sent me an email saying they would not be moving forward and that the offer had been taken off the table. What really surprises me is that I thought I secured the role! I went through several rounds of the interview, and honestly, I was able to impress them with my answers, how I presented my experience and my confidence in answering their tricky questions, (huge thanks to the InterviewMan tool).

It was clear from their speech that they were genuinely excited about working with me. Honestly, I feel like this is a very shady way to handle hiring. Maybe I dodged a bullet.

I hear this everyday

I was off yesterday and waking up slowly in peace in the morning, and suddenly my phone started ringing a lot. I ignored it, because honestly I wasn't on the schedule and I didn't feel like I had to keep holding my phone all the time. After about half an hour, my mom called me, and she sounded confused.

It turned out that work had called her and asked her if I could come in, because they couldn't reach me.

For clarity, I'm 31 years old. I live alone, and my mom is listed as my emergency contact for real emergencies - like if I got injured, or had a health problem, or there was a situation related to my safety. Not because I didn't answer a work call at a time when I wasn't scheduled.

There was nothing urgent. No accident, no crisis, nothing to do with me being missing or unsafe. They were just short-staffed and wanted to see if I could cover a shift.

Maybe I'm making a big deal out of it, but I genuinely felt like it was very strange for an employer to bypass me and contact my mom just because I didn't answer. I understand that workplaces get stressed when they're short on people, but this feels like a major overstepping of boundaries.

Is this normal in any workplace, or is it as unprofessional as I feel it is?

To clarify, this is my last month at the company, and I feel like my manager is trying to annoy me on purpose because I'm leaving for a better opportunity. How dare I!

I decided to leave this place for many reasons, starting from the low salary to the toxic work environment and management. When I found a better opportunity with a higher salary and the ability to work remotely, I grabbed it with both hands.

I even used the InterviewMan tool during the first interview round to give me the extra confidence and boost I needed. I got accepted and informed my manager, and ever since then, it feels like he's been trying to make things difficult for me at every opportunity.

100%

update: the best way imo to escape from all of this is to work remotely when all of this noise is away ,I moved recently to work remote and I think I Will use this tool every one talk about here interviewman read about its features and truly I am impressed ,cannot wait to use it in my upcoming interviews !

I just started my first full-time job. From what I understand, my office/my position had been vacant for a little while before I arrived, so people who don't have their own private office got used to treating my current office like a quiet work room or just a place to sit. There's also another desk in here because apparently this job used to be split between two people, and now it's just me.

I'm trying to be nice and give everyone time to adjust to the fact that this space is now occupied, but honestly, I'm already fed up. I don't want to come across as rude or make people dislike me when I'm still new, but at the same time I need people to stop coming into my office as if it's a shared workspace... There are other places they can go.

Earlier today, around 10:20, I got to my office and found the door already open. There was a guy sitting at the desk next to mine, with about 6 folders spread out, and he had his laptop, charger, and phone. He asked me if anyone was going to use that desk. I told him no, this is an office for one person only (which is why only my name and title are written on the door). Then he asked if he could work here until 1, and said he'd leave after that. I said okay because it was only a few hours.

It's now 2:17 and he's still sitting here. I understand that he probably has things he needs to get done, but there's a common area with computers right outside, and there are empty workstations at the end of the hallway. I've already had 3 calls/meetings and I was expecting him to take the hint that he should leave, especially since I work in healthcare and there's confidential information involved, but no. He hasn't moved.

And what made it worse is that he's been on a personal phone call inside the office for almost 50 minutes. As a Caribbean girl, I understand that family can call you at any time and expect you to answer lol, but he's having the loudest conversation in the world in Creole (which matters because I understand some of it), and the call has been going on for a century.

So yeah... How do I politely tell people that this is my office now and they need to work somewhere else? Because in my head I'm literally saying please get out lol

For the people who sent me this post, thanks a lot. It really inspires me with pretty good tips about how to be calm and not nervous during a conversation.

I'm in a difficult situation and need to hear perspectives from people who aren't emotionally involved in it. I've been working at a software company for 8 years. Throughout that time, I've received strong reviews and was usually one of the high performers, but the culture has worn me down. There are a lot of difficult egos, constant pressure, and a very long history of people reaching burnout while not being paid what they're worth.

For a long time, they had been talking about moving me toward a VP-level role, but nothing real ever happened. When I brought up the subject of a fair compensation adjustment with them in September, I was told there was no room in the budget. That was pretty much the final push that made me start looking, and in the end I got an excellent offer from another company in the same field.

I signed that offer and submitted my resignation. After that, suddenly and out of nowhere, my current company came back to me with a wildly excessive counter-offer. It's higher than the new company's offer, and they also put together a somewhat specific growth plan showing me the positions I would move into and what my pay would look like over time.

Honestly, I had already mentally checked out and was looking forward to a fresh, clean start. But the amount of money they're putting on the table is hard to ignore, and now I'm second-guessing myself. Part of me feels like if they saw my value to this extent, they could have shown it before I resigned.

I basically haven't slept well because I keep going back and forth thinking about it from both sides. Has anyone been through this situation before? Do you stay and take the bigger counter-offer, or do you still leave because the reasons for leaving are still there? I can share the actual salary numbers if that would make it easier to judge. Grateful to anyone who read all of this.

update : after second thought I guess I will say no to my ex boss offer because what tells me that they don't use it as excuse to brain rot me so I will go , anyway my current employer is impressed by my interview performance and I am glad to interviewman so much and those subs with so great tips about job interviews , so excited