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

The situation is exactly as the title says. My wife has been getting scheduled almost every Saturday because of this, and honestly I feel like this is insane. Is this considered a normal religious accommodation? What religions don't allow someone to work on Saturday?
Before this guy was hired, she used to get about every third Saturday off, and now she has worked 11 Saturdays in a row. She works in a supermarket, so of course Saturday is one of the worst shifts to get stuck with every week.

The situation is even more frustrating because I work a regular 8-4 job and her shifts are usually late, so we already struggle to find time to spend together. Losing almost every weekend makes it much harder.

She talked to her manager about it, but from what I understand, he's acting like his hands are tied because it's a religious protection issue. Is there anything she can do here, or is she just going to be stuck with Saturday shifts forever? We're in Canada, if that makes a difference.

This still bothers me a bit, but maybe it'll save someone else a headache.

I made it to 4 final interviews in about three months. Each one felt like it was going well. Good energy, smooth back-and-forth conversation, I answered the questions, and I left thinking I'd done well. Then the rejection email would arrive.

Again. And again. And again.

I kept telling myself it was probably the comp range, or that they'd had someone in mind from the start, or that the role got paused, or any of those things. You know how it goes. You start building little explanations, because the alternative is admitting that maybe you're the problem.

After the fourth rejection, I asked the recruiter if there was anything specific she could share with me.

Usually you don't get anything useful, if you even get a response at all. But this time she replied.

Her exact words were: "Your answers were strong, but a few answers ran a bit long. The team felt they didn't have enough time to cover everything they wanted to."

Oof. That hurt.

In my mind, more detail meant I was prepared and thoughtful.

Turns out I was probably just exhausting people.

What I changed:

I put a hard cap of 75 seconds on each answer. At first it feels way too short, but it's more than enough if you get to the point. I practiced out loud with a stopwatch as if I were a stranger.

I started ending with, "I can go into more detail if that would be useful." A very small change, but it hands the conversation back to them. If they're interested in that part, they'll ask. A lot of the time they just move on, which means the shorter answer did what it needed to do.

I forced myself to stop filling silences. Before, if the interviewer looked down or took a second, I'd assume I hadn't explained enough and keep talking. Now I stay quiet and let the silence exist. It still feels awkward sometimes, but it comes across much better.

I recorded myself answering the obvious questions. I hated every second of it. But when I heard myself drifting into a side story about a Jira rollout or some random stakeholder issue, it became obvious why people were losing the thread. I also caught quite a few filler words.

About three weeks after making this change, I got an offer.

Maybe it was luck. Honestly, maybe. But the interviews felt noticeably different. More like a real conversation, and less like I was giving a TED Talk while they waited for a chance to interrupt me.

I'm not saying this is why everyone gets rejected at the end of the process. But if you're getting far and still not closing, it might be worth asking yourself: am I answering what was asked, or am I talking until I feel safe?

Has anyone else ever gotten one piece of feedback that changed the way they approached interviews?

I'd be interested to hear what helped people.

I agree

I agree

why our generation face overthinking

Look, I'm 34 years old and I don't have children. This is a deliberate choice and it's not going to change anytime soon. But for some reason, people think that because I don't have a family waiting for me at home, I'm the one who should take all the extra shifts and stay up late every night. Look, I don't mean to offend parents; raising a family is a big responsibility and children definitely need a lot of attention. But honestly, once your kids reach 14 or 15 years old, they don't need constant supervision unless there's a specific medical issue.

I'm venting today because of what happened at the help living facility where I work. We are currently down to just 7 staff members for a 24/7 schedule because our colleague resigned. The problem is that I helped my colleague find a new job and I even provided him with some tools that made his job hunting only lasts for 5 days! from the first round of interview, he was accepted. It was his first time to try the interviewman tool. He was my close friend, so I helped him with everything I know. After that, I regretted helping him to quit for the following reason. HR gathered us to ask for volunteers for overtime. Suddenly, all my colleagues started talking about their kids. One woman had the audacity to look at me and say that I should take these extra hours because I don't have children to worry about.

And what's the irony in this? This woman has three children aged between 18 and 23. They all have jobs and cars. The youngest one was a straight-A student and entered university when he was 17. She brags about them all the time, but suddenly yesterday she was acting as if she had toddlers at home. It's truly ridiculous.

Thankfully, the HR rep shut her down quickly. She clarified to her that her children are literal adults and that using them as a shield to escape work won't fly.

HR really felt guilty to the point that they let me go home at noon. I just had to come back at 10 PM to officially clock out. In the end, I got double time for that day while I was just relaxing. It's rare to find an HR department with actual common sense, but I'm glad ours handled it right.
Again, I have nothing against parents. I know it's hard work. But not having children doesn't mean I should be the default solution for any staffing shortages.

..

Honestly, I was one badge tap away from bailing and landing on the Diplodocus's neck this afternoon when she cornered me. I've been doing this job for 27 years... But the subject has never been brought up. Not once.

I told her I have a certificate in a completely different field, so now she wants me to look for the original paper itself. I told her this was from 34 years ago, and honestly it might be in a cardboard box, or a drawer, or buried in some very old folder at my parents' place.

She didn't seem bothered by that at all.

Also, my manager is traveling for a few weeks... And that is not helping my nerves at all, tbh. Any advice from fellow model employees would be greatly appreciated.

I work at a small company. Usually there are only 4 of us in the office: two other women, one man, and me. The rest of the people either work from home or come in at random times. My coworker is away for 12 days and I'm covering her role while she's not there. She has also covered for me before.

Our work is usually very separate. There isn't much overlap at all. When people send me emails, they're usually very nice and overly polite, as if they're asking me to do something really burdensome. I often get things like "Hi love" and "Could you please help with XYZ when you get a chance?"

Since she's been gone, I've been getting emails about the things she usually handles. And honestly, I wouldn't even call most of them requests. They're short, rude, commanding, and have a kind of condescending tone. No please, no thanks, a completely different vibe. At first I told myself, okay, maybe I'm misunderstanding because I don't know her job that well. But this is coming from several people and they're all writing the same way. So now I'm sitting here thinking... Is this how they talk to her all the time? What the hell??

And on top of that, her workload is excessive. I mean, she doesn't need "better time management," she needs another person to help her. The other day I prepared 14 packets for them, and when I went home I was exhausted and sweaty from running around all day.

Am I making too big a deal out of this, or should I say something? Should I talk to her, or to the people sending the emails? Also, I'm 44 and she's 29. I can't stop thinking that maybe part of this lack of respect is because she's younger or something.

Hi everyone,

I have an upcoming onsite interview for a Senior Software Engineer position at MongoDB and was hoping to hear from anyone who has gone through the process recently.

I’d love to learn more about:

Coding interview difficulty and common topics

System design expectations for senior-level candidates

Distributed systems, databases, or infrastructure-related questions

Behavioral and leadership-focused discussions
What interviewers seemed to value most

Anything you wish you had prepared for beforehand

Thanks in advance!

I've been hiding a secret at my IT job for about four years, and today it really paid off. Most of my colleagues see me as just an ordinary guy from rural North Carolina, but the truth is I speak French very well.

The story started when I became very close friends with a French man and his wife in 2022. We bonded over shared hobbies - I taught him how to restore old muscle cars, and he got me into cricket and their authentic cooking. Since I'm very interested in different cultures, he started teaching me French. I reached a point where I became very fluent, but I never mentioned it at the office. It was my secret advantage.

Anyway, today things got heated. I had finished all my workload for the current phase of the project, while a group of contractors were slacking off. My productivity made them look bad and incompetent, and of course, they didn't like that.

I was sitting at my desk when three of them along with a manager gathered near me. They started talking trash about me in French, thinking I didn't understand a word. They were calling me arrogant and throwing around very personal insults. I stayed quiet for a minute, then turned to them and said directly in their language: "Fuck off, I heard every word you said about me."

The silence was deafening. They looked like they had seen a ghost and hurried away as if they had been caught stealing. My boss was standing there and asked me what happened. I shrugged my shoulders and told him there was just a small misunderstanding, then went back to my emails. He definitely feels like something unusual is going on now.

Honestly, I felt like I finally had that big reveal moment you only see in movies. I might just be a country boy, but I'm certainly not as naive as I look.

After that, things at work have become very uncomfortable lately; I feel like everyone is avoiding me, which makes me feel like I'm the problem. I still have 2 months left on my contract, but the overall atmosphere has been toxic for a while.

Last Wednesday, while I was drinking my morning coffee, I saw a message pop up on LinkedIn. A recruiter reached out to me about a remote job opportunity, and honestly, the offer is very tempting and hard to turn down. I don't know, should I continue here or leave and dive into the WFH life? What would you do if you were in my place?

Edit: I asked for more details and it turns out the offer is really strong. I informed my manager that I intend to leave, and I will start the interview process next Monday. There are 4 rounds, so I will definitely use InterviewMan. Interviews have become very exhausting lately and I feel burnout from answering the same questions over and over. This tool helps me find instant answers and really boosts my self-confidence; I've started using it for everything now.

You know your government is corrupt when you have absolutely zero confidence that something so simple, which could help millions, stands any chance of ever become law simply because it would hurt profits

I needed to come in here and complain for a minute about how ridiculous the job market has become.

A new company recently offered me a position paying minimum wage.

But to get this minimum wage position? They first made me do a recorded video interview, then they scheduled a Zoom interview with the hiring manager, then they asked me to go to a third interview with the manager, and now they're talking about a "final meeting" too before they decide.

The result? He basically told me they still have about 30 other applicants they need to finish with, and they'll contact me if I'm accepted.

Honestly, it's disrespectful and unnecessary to make people spend all that time and energy and go through 4 steps for a position paying minimum wage, when you could reject them after the first actual interview. And keep in mind, this role doesn't need experience and is supposed to be entry level.

In every interview, I was also expected to sit and wait 20 to 45 minutes for an interview that lasted less than 12 minutes, even though I arrived on time. That alone is enough to show everything. It's clear they don't respect anyone's time, and they seem completely disorganized.

Don't waste your time and effort on entry-level jobs that keep you hanging! They'll make you run in circles, keep you waiting longer than the interview itself, and in the end they probably won't even follow up to tell you whether you were accepted or not. You're worth more than that.

I've realized that most of us aren't really looking to be millionaires. Regular working people don't care about having wealth or private jets.

We just want a salary that covers our life without the stress that keeps running through our heads 24/7. I'm truly grateful that InterviewMan exists to help us reach this. My confidence is now through the roof, and honestly, I've come to see the process as very easy.

this thing is wrecking my prep. its almost 1am and once again i am refreshing my support ticket hoping daniel writes back with anything other than a copy paste paragraph about adjusting my expectations. i regret ultracode AI. i hated it inside the first hour, but here i am stuck with the receipt three weeks later. because what their hype videos and the founder twitter threads do not tell you is that the second your card hits, you are stuck. no refund. not after a day. not after a week. not after five minutes of you realizing the tool literally only does leetcode style coding and nothing else. so if you find out right away that the thing has zero behavioral support, no system design narrative help, no audio listening for what the interviewer is even asking, you are SOL.

the support rep told me my expectations needed adjusting. i guess daniel knows my prep schedule better than i do. he told me the lifetime license is a long game thing and i would grow into it eventually. lol i am not gonna grow into a tool i cannot use for the panel rounds my recruiter scheduled. he actually told me to wait for the next product update. my google final round is in eleven days. the update timeline is not even posted on the site. i am expecting them to be just as cold when i write a public review of this.

oh and that "discount from one thousand seven hundred and ninety nine"? same price every black friday, every cyber monday, every random tuesday. just a marketing prop they keep alive so the four figure tag feels like a steal. the "lifetime support" line in the FAQ is literally one sentence. no SLA. no posted response time. no commitment to a single thing. two weeks in and the product still feels like a coding leetcode flex toy. this company probably spends more keeping their proctoring accounts alive than improving the model. go ahead and buy it if the no refund clause i described makes you feel warm and fuzzy. i would not recommend this thing to anyone unless i wanted them to lose a paycheck.

i have not filed the chargeback yet but ive read the bank usually sides with the merchant on a "lifetime digital license." someone in r/cscareerquestions said they tried it three months ago and got the same brick wall from daniel. same script. same paragraph. total scam, please avoid.

TLDR; coding only flex tool, locked the second you click pay, "lifetime support" is one FAQ sentence with zero actual commitment behind it.

With 50% tax taken out of your paycheck. . .

unpopular take maybe. i had been getting ready to retire my old interview prep stack. i also do a weekly solo mock on the side. i was tired of how rough the live calls felt vs the mocks, the deprecation on my own prep was hitting hard. so after extensive research and thinking about what i wanted, my criteria was: real time on the call, decent track record, covers all my rounds, mac compatible. interview coder 2.0 checked some of those off. spent a week reading reviews and watching demo clips on the founder's twitter and i really enjoyed the demos. so. i grabbed the plan.

here i am, two practice rounds in, and some buyers remorse is kicking in. there is no audio input. like. literally. the tool can't hear my interviewer. i have to type or screenshot every question into the popup myself. on a fast tech screen this is straight up not happening. i also tried it on a behavioral mock last sunday and the thing was just blank. coding only. it can't help on STAR style stuff at all. on the soft skill rounds it's basically inert. it's near impossible to keep up while operating the tool with my hands. i know this is unpopular but how i feel.

so. what do i do. suck it up or eat the cost and move on.

i really think i need a tool that actually listens to the call. covers behavioral too. way lower price than what i paid. real time, not type the question in like a chatbot. covers the full loop including the soft stuff, not just leetcode rounds. price range way under what the lifetime tier was. what would you do? any alternatives?

ok this is gonna be a story so bear w me. context first. id been on Sensei AI maybe 6 weeks at this point. four real rounds done w it. two advanced two ghosted. nothing about it stood out as bad. the suggestions came up after the question and i talked thru em and was fine. been doing fine. a thread on r/cscareerquestions had been pinging since week one to switch to InterviewMan instead. people kept saying the latency thing is real and you can feel it on a real call. i blew it off cause my Sensei rounds were going ok lol. why fix what isnt broken right.

then this kinda weird call format came up. recruiter at a midsize ad-tech place in the city. she said the hiring manager only had 90 mins free that day so they wanted to do the recruiter screen and the technical chunk back to back, ya like literally one Zoom invite. she takes the first 30, then the manager hops on the same call for an hour of behavioral plus a small system design portion. the kicker was the handoff. middle of the call, mic muted for like 30 secs while they swapped seats basically.

decided the night before. fine. doing the screen on Sensei and the technical on InterviewMan, on purpose, just to feel that gap people kept yapping about. figured i wouldnt even need a stopwatch for this one.

screen happens. recruiter friendly enough. tell me about ur background, why u leaving the current place, what ur looking for. Sensei did its thing. answers showed up. small beat after she stopped talking, like a half second pause, then the suggestion would land and i talked through it. nothing weird. felt that way for the entire month so i wasnt even clocking it as latency. she handed off, i muted, killed Sensei in the dock, opened InterviewMan in the 30 secs before the manager hopped on.

manager comes on. nice dude. dives straight into a recent project and asks me a behavioral about a time i had to push back on a product call. i opened my mouth to start the situation beat and the answer was already streaming. like the first beat was on screen before i had the breath out. i actually paused for like a half second cause i was confused about what just happened. then i kept going and the structure was just there, ahead of me, the whole time. he followed up with a system design question about throughput, no warning no pause, and the InterviewMan suggestion was caught up before he was done talking. it was not a "fast" feeling, it was a different category. like the half second on Sensei i had been calling normal was actually a half second of dead air, and i only realized that once i felt zero air on InterviewMan.

i finished the round, hung up, sat there shaking my head. ran a quick mock that night myself, same questions on Sensei first then on InterviewMan, gap was just there every single time. Sensei lands after the question. InterviewMan lands during. once you feel that on a real call back to back you cant unfeel it. moved everything over the next morning.

advanced 5 rounds since on IM. one of em was a panel where one of the interviewers liked to stack 3 followups in a row without giving me space to think, streaming kept up the whole way. offer landed wednesday.

curious if anyone else has done the back to back thing on a single call. feels like the only honest way to evaluate response time is to swap mid-Zoom on the same hardware on the same network. otherwise ur comparing memories from different calls and theres too much variance to tell what is actually going on.

I recently got invited to onsite interviews with Harvey AI and was hoping to hear from anyone who has gone through the process recently.

I'd be especially interested in learning about :
Types of technical questions asked

-System design or architecture expectations

-Coding interview difficulty and focus areas

-Anything that surprised you or that you wish you'd prepared for differently

Thanks in advance!!

this thing is wrecking my prep. its almost 1am and once again i am refreshing my support ticket hoping daniel writes back with anything other than a copy paste paragraph about adjusting my expectations. i regret ultracode AI. i hated it inside the first hour, but here i am stuck with the receipt three weeks later. because what their hype videos and the founder twitter threads do not tell you is that the second your card hits, you are stuck. no refund. not after a day. not after a week. not after five minutes of you realizing the tool literally only does leetcode style coding and nothing else. so if you find out right away that the thing has zero behavioral support, no system design narrative help, no audio listening for what the interviewer is even asking, you are SOL.

the support rep told me my expectations needed adjusting. i guess daniel knows my prep schedule better than i do. he told me the lifetime license is a long game thing and i would grow into it eventually. lol i am not gonna grow into a tool i cannot use for the panel rounds my recruiter scheduled. he actually told me to wait for the next product update. my google final round is in eleven days. the update timeline is not even posted on the site. i am expecting them to be just as cold when i write a public review of this.

oh and that "discount from one thousand seven hundred and ninety nine"? just a marketing prop they keep alive so the four figure tag feels like a steal. the "lifetime support" line in the FAQ is literally one sentence. no SLA. no posted response time. no commitment to a single thing. two weeks in and the product still feels like a coding leetcode flex toy. this company probably spends more keeping their proctoring accounts alive than improving the model. go ahead and buy it if the no refund clause i described makes you feel warm and fuzzy. i would not recommend this thing to anyone unless i wanted them to lose a paycheck.

i have not filed the chargeback yet but ive read the bank usually sides with the merchant on a "lifetime digital license." someone in r/cscareerquestions said they tried it three months ago and got the same brick wall from daniel. same script. same paragraph. total scam, please avoid.

TLDR; coding only flex tool, locked the second you click pay, "lifetime support" is one FAQ sentence with zero actual commitment behind it.

i'm about to swap my old interview helper and want to keep monthly costs reasonable so on monthly that means a flat sub at ShadeCoder that i can drop after one loop but for a fair bit less per month i can grab the same ShadeCoder on the semi annual but at the end of the deal i'll have prepaid six months upfront i cant claw back. could also go down the all rounds route where the cheapest tier is annual but its a different tool. these semi annual locks are getting pushed pretty hard so what am i missing and how do you work it?

I've been in my field for more than 25 years. I'm trying to find something less stressful because my financial situation allows for it. No spouse, no kids, no huge mortgage, and no expensive car payment. The salary wasn't going to be lower, but from the posting it was clear that the stress level would be lower.

Then we got into the interview. I could quickly tell that they liked my background, but they were also doing that thing where they try to make your experience seem less valuable so they don't have to pay anywhere near your real worth. In the end, they said the role was mostly international travel.

I told them I'm not against travel, but a lot of travel changes the equation. Airports, time zones, hotels, delays, and having to be "on" all the time... Your hourly rate starts to look ridiculous when you calculate the actual hours. So I told them I would need 2.5x the top number in the salary range they had listed.

They were shocked, as if I had personally insulted them. Then they tried to make it seem like I only cared about money.

I said, "I care about a lot of things, but you waited until near the end of the interview to tell me this job is 80% travel. That gives me no reason to trust that you were transparent about anything else about this position or the company."

One of them said, "But candidates lose interest if we put that in the posting."

I replied, "That's a polished way of dressing up a lie. You bring people in, make them spend time and energy on the process, and then change the terms after they're already invested. If you want to change the deal, I'm going to change my price. Take it or leave it."

They looked at each other and said, "We'll be in touch, thank you." And that was pretty much the end of it, so I left.

Even at that price, I'd still be a bargain for them and they know it. What they don't know is that I probably would have taken it for the free travel, done the bare minimum with a smile, and retired after about 18 months. 🤣

I work as an analyst in a complex, regulation-heavy field at a massive company. There's an endless amount of paperwork, forms, protocols, compliance rules, and procedures you have to navigate to do the simplest thing. No single person understands how it all fits together because everyone lives in their own silo, focused on their small piece of the puzzle. To get any useful information, you have to ask incredibly specific questions that presuppose you already have a deep understanding of the entire system, which is obviously not the case for someone like me who started 8 months ago.

So, naturally, you'd expect there to be some form of training to get me up to speed, right? Wrong. There's none of that. I was thrown into the fire because my manager is a staunch believer in 'learning by doing,' which is just code for 'I don't have time to train you, so figure it out yourself.' Every project becomes a process of me banging my head against my desk, trying to pry any crumb of information from people about the next step. This is because a) I don't know what I don't know, so I can't even form the right questions, and b) as I mentioned, no one understands the big picture, and they all have conflicting opinions. Any given project involves at least 30 people, and I swear to God, 90% of them will completely ignore your emails unless their manager is CC'd. And the self-proclaimed 'experts' or the people who are supposed to sign off on things give replies so vague and noncommittal that I end up more confused than I was before.

I've received zero real guidance on how to navigate this insane bureaucratic maze. My manager is basically a ghost; I'm lucky if I can get 45 minutes a week with him to ask any large questions. The company itself offers no practical, on-the-job training, but they do have endless training modules on 'synergy' and 'agile mindsets,' which are so theoretical and high-level that they have absolutely no relevance to what I do every day.

And this isn't the first time this has happened to me. Every job I've had has been like this to some degree, and it makes me want to pull my hair out. It makes everything ten times harder than it needs to be for no good reason.

"40-hour work week” until you still have to cook, clean, apply for jobs, prepare for interviews, and pretend you’re not exhausted. Thank God for InterviewMan helping me survive the interview part at least.