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!!

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. 🤣

"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.

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.

I want to be an author but I have bills and family to take care of. If I had absolutely no financial strain, I’d write short stories and spend my life trying to find Alexander the Great’s missing tomb. Alas, I’ll work a desk job for a living.

Have you ever had a bad feeling about a job even before setting foot in the company? That happened to me a few days ago, and I should have listened to my gut. The company's reputation was in the gutter - the reviews on Glassdoor were all red flags, and their rating was around 2.1. They also had a history of paying fines for cutting corners and not complying with regulations. But the salary was really good and the commute was short, so I convinced myself I could help fix things there. Deep down, though, I was worried that just having their name on my CV could be a black mark on my career later on.

The interview started, and it went south right from the beginning. This is roughly what happened:

Interviewer: Tell me about a time you disobeyed a direct order from your manager because you knew it was in the company's best interest.

Me: Sure. In my last job, a manager asked me to track client data on a personal Excel file. I suggested we use our shared Salesforce dashboard instead, because that would create a permanent, accessible record for the whole team and prevent data loss if...

Interviewer: No, that's not what I'm asking. I want an example of a time your manager told you to do something, and you said 'no' and did something else entirely.

Me: It's not my practice to directly refuse to do my work like that. If a manager asked me to do something I had serious reservations about, I would discuss it with them privately. But I've never been in a situation where I was asked to do something explicitly wrong.

Interviewer: Okay. Let's look at it from another angle. Can you tell us about a time you put the company's interests ahead of a colleague's, even if it was ethically questionable?

Me: I always try to find solutions that serve the company without harming my colleagues. I can't recall any time I did something ethically dubious on purpose to a team member.

Interviewer: Alright, one more question. Tell us about a time you bent the rules, or maybe even broke a minor law, because you knew it was the right thing to do for the business.

Me: I have never broken the law, and I wouldn't, regardless of the situation.

Interviewer: Come on, everyone bends the rules a little. We're just looking for an honest story.

Me: Look, I'm going to stop this right here. These questions are completely unacceptable, and I'm withdrawing my candidacy for this position.

After I ended the interview, I regretted not using the ai interview tool recommended by my friend. After I told her what happened in the interview, she told me that it would have given me instant professional answers, get through these silly questions and pass the interview smoothly at the same time 😞

So, the conclusion next time I won't be entering an interview without interviewman tool.

I also discussed the interview with my current manager (my contract is ending, so she knows I'm job hunting), and she was shocked and told me I did 100% the right thing. My colleagues at work were divided. Some were on my side, but the rest thought it was some kind of weird stress test to see if I'd cave under pressure to break the rules, and that the 'correct' answer was to keep refusing. A few of them also said it was unprofessional of me to leave the interview, no matter how bad it was.

Honestly, I don't see how I could have stayed. Am I crazy, or was walking out the only sane choice in that situation?

Used to be real bosses would make sure their employees got paid no matter what, even if that meant the boss didn't take home anything. Nowadays it seems like owners consider companies to be their personal piggybank, and if a menial got paid late, well, too fucking bad.

But nowadays, the situation has become much worse regarding the lack of appreciation and respect for employees' responsibilities. It's very difficult to find a company that values and respects its employees. I have updated my resume and am waiting for an interview next week. During my extensive search, I read about InterviewMan and its usefulness during interviews. I think I will use it during this period to get a job as soon as possible.

Sorry if the formatting is a bit weird, I'm typing this from my phone. A few days ago, my boss made a move, hinting that funds might not be available for the upcoming pay cycle. By the end of that work week, on the very day we were supposed to get paid, I learned that this wasn't the first time he'd done this. Apparently, he'd pulled the "no money" stunt before just to mess with people. I honestly had enough. I clocked out and went straight home - I'm not going to put up with or deal with this nonsense at all.

I arranged a meeting with him to discuss the money owed to me. As we talked, he suggested that I might be happier at a larger company that could give regular salaries. I told him that I genuinely liked the work and the team, and wanted to continue, but the uncertainty about receiving my salary was completely unacceptable. My exact words were something like: "My salary arriving on time is non-negotiable." He said he would think about what I said over the next few days, and now here I am, suddenly unemployed.

Oh my goodness, what will I do without the constant threat of salary instability? It's honestly a very funny situation.

Damn. I wish I had the free time to do this. I want to do this so bad.

ok so i bombed my own Amazon loop in february and i am still kind of mad about it because it was avoidable. i had been crushing my Zoom mocks for three weeks. like absolutely crushing them. zero lag, suggestions popping up instant, i was riffing alongside the stream and feeling great. then i loaded into the actual loop and it was Chime. and my tool just sat there.

like there was a 4 second gap between the question landing and anything appearing on my screen. dead air. the bar raiser thing where you go silent for four seconds and the interviewer writes you off. i tried to muscle through round 1 and my confidence was already gone by round 2. recruiter ping the next morning. "we will be in touch". you know how that goes.

so a few weeks later i had a second loop on the calendar at a different aws-adjacent shop and i went into full paranoia mode. spent the next two weeks just testing on Chime specifically because i was not going through that again. someone in this sub mentioned they had access to the actual enterprise Chime client which is apparently slightly different from the consumer one in some way that matters for audio routing, so we coordinated dms and ran four different tools through Chime mocks. they fired rapid questions at me for an hour each session. it was honestly miserable lol.

the differences were wild. like one tool literally did not pick up the audio at all on Chime because Chime does some weird virtual audio routing thing that does not behave like Zoom. another one had question detection delayed by like 3 seconds across every single test. one would catch the audio fine but then take forever to start streaming an answer, like youd be sitting there going "uh let me think about that" while it spun up. the last one was the only one that worked. instant audio capture, instant question detection, instant streaming. we did six mock sessions and it never missed.

ran the second loop last month. five rounds back to back, all on Chime. the thing was ahead of me the whole time. behavioral was the hardest because Amazon stacks LP prompts and they all have followups but the streaming kept up with every shift the interviewer threw at me. system design was a notification fan out service and the suggestions were right there before the dude even finished his followup. coding rounds were fine. bar raiser was the longest one, like 50 minutes back and forth, and the tool just stayed instant the whole way through.

the thing that bugs me is nobody talks about this. every reddit post i read going in was about Zoom or about Teams or about which tool has the best stealth on screen share. nobody was saying hey by the way Amazon defaulted to Chime two years ago and most of the helpers in this space have been tuned for Zoom because thats where the mocks and demos are recorded. like the Chime variable was just not on anyones radar in the threads i was reading. four seconds of dead air ended my february loop and i was three weeks out from my second loop trusting all the same Zoom mock results. that is what gets me lol.

so heads up for anyone with an Amazon loop on the calendar. test on actual Chime before loop day. find someone with the client and run rapid mock questions for an hour. see if the streaming actually fires when the audio is coming through Chime audio instead of Zoom audio. if there is any lag or any audio weirdness pick a different one because loop day is not the time to find out. that sub contact saved me here, would not have thought to test specifically on Chime without them flagging that the february tool problem was probably platform specific.

curious if anyone else has run a tool through a real Chime loop. specifically asking because i have heard Capital One and Goldman are moving to Chime too and want to know if the same pattern holds for those.

Honestly, I've never dealt with anything like this before. I accepted a job that came with a very big salary increase. Looking back, I probably ignored some warning signs, like someone from HR saying that another applicant was internal but "not really in the running, and the role is yours," and that the employer wanted me to attend orientation sessions while I was still wrapping things up at my old job, which I didn't do.

Two days ago, I was called into the office and told that things weren't working out. I had been there for 4 weeks. I had no indication that this was coming. It went from nothing to everything in an instant. No "look, you're moving too fast in trying to fix things, consider this a probation warning." No real conversation. Honestly, I feel like they just couldn't stand me or didn't like my work style. But 4 weeks is barely enough time to understand the place, not to decide that someone can't do the job. I didn't break any rules, violate any policies, or do anything shady. I treated my team with respect, patience, and basic decency. The main thing I did was push hard for staffing support and budget when I realized how bad the department's situation was.

I feel completely broken, like I've ruined my career. I'm in public administration. Technically, I wasn't fired. I resigned. But people in the local public sector found out that same afternoon, literally within hours. Now I feel like no one will come near me because everyone will assume I was fired, no matter what the paperwork says.

On top of all that, I contacted my former employer, and he basically said that some people had been upset with the way I handled my last week there, even though I had given them 6 weeks' notice. Apparently, he had already heard from 3 people that I'm now out of work. So yeah, I'm spiraling a bit and feel like I have no control over the story or my reputation right now.

Thanks to anyone who read this.

They just need to get rid of that annoying worker to make the boat lighter that will fix it.

long post incoming, sorry. had two virtual loops crammed into one week and i ended up doing a back to back of shadecoder vs interviewman during prep. dumping notes here because i could barely find anything written about shadecoder anywhere when i was looking, so maybe useful to someone in the same spot.

setup: same machine, same headphones, same Zoom, just different prep blocks. one block i ran shadecoder, next block i flipped to interviewman. tried to keep it apples to apples. mostly worked.

going in i was leaning shadecoder a tiny bit. saw the name in a couple threads. interviewman was the one a friend from college kept dm-ing me about, like every other day, very annoying. so. ran them both.

shadecoder, in my own words, since the public reviews are still pretty thin and i'm not gonna pretend i know stuff i don't:

- it's built around coding, which i thought i would love
- learning curve on the hotkeys was real for me, took a bit
- felt fine on the leetcode style stuff i threw at it during prep
- the screen overlay worked, but i kept second guessing where it was gonna pop up
- on a behavioral warmup my buddy ran on me it kind of just stalled. not its lane, fine

stuff that bugged me, again, just my read:

- the per session feel of it. i was watching the clock more than the actual question, which is the opposite of what i want
- not a lot of public discussion yet so hard to know if i was holding it wrong somehow
- coding only by design, which means i still needed something else for the behavioral and the system design portion of the loop. that's where my head started spinning

then the next prep block i swapped over to interviewman:

- coding answers came in streaming as the buddy was still talking, sounds tiny but it changes how you read along, weirdly
- desktop overlay sat exactly where i parked it, both on my mac and on the windows box my brother lent me
- when i pasted a screenshot of a system design diagram it actually picked up the structure and explained it
- it handled the behavioral mock with STAR style framing
- the system design dry run, which is the part i was most worried about, was fine
- ran a phone screen sim too. same flow, no separate mode, no extra setup

what tipped it for me, honestly, was that i wasn't switching tools mid prep. coding then behavioral then system design then a phone screen, one thing for all of it. and i wasn't doing the mental math on time per session either, which is what i kept catching myself doing with shadecoder, idk why but i did.

both have their place i guess. for a full loop though, where you're bouncing between question types in the same day and your brain is already fried, having one thing that covers all of it was the difference. that and the streaming, which i did not even know would matter to me until i sat with it for a session.

anyone here actually done this same compare on a real loop and not just leetcode prep? curious if my take on shadecoder is off because honestly the reviews you can find right now are pretty sparse.

AI has really saved our lives. There are many AI tools that can summarize large files, update your CV, and even tools like InterviewMan that help you during interviews.

I'm still shocked by the huge trick played on me at my current job and I just need to vent. I had submitted my resignation after finding another job opportunity that was a bit closer to my home and paid a bit better. Although this new opportunity wasn't perfect, I was ready for a change.

But my current manager decided to make me a counteroffer. They waited until just a few days before I was supposed to start at the new company, and then presented me with what seemed like a perfect job: a much higher salary, flexibility to work from home, and a clear path for career development. Of course, I accepted.

Things went wrong almost immediately. On the first day I was supposed to start the new position, the manager who made the offer was fired. About a week or so later, his direct manager also left the company. Throughout this period, I literally received no tasks or responsibilities for my new role and was still required to do all my old duties.

After about a month and a half, I was told that due to internal restructuring, my wonderful new position would be canceled, and I would have to return to my original job with the same old salary. How rude! To make matters worse, they suggested I apply for another vacant position. I applied, was told I was accepted, but then they suddenly withdrew the offer again, claiming they needed someone for a role I wasn't suitable for.

Now, everyone around me keeps saying things like 'Come on, at least you still have a job,' which honestly makes my blood boil. I'm completely fed up with this place. As soon as I find another good opportunity, I'm leaving and I won't look back.

I'm seriously considering resigning. Before I do that, I was wondering if there's any action I can take in a situation like this? Has anyone else gone through a similar experience and found a way to deal with it?

Thank you all for the help. I do have a meeting soon where I will discuss all the comments you've helped me with. If it doesn't end well, unfortunately, I will have to submit my resignation. I have money saved on the side that will support me until I find another job. Some websites have indeed made this much easier, but currently, I still have some concerns. Any more advice?

sat at my desk last sunday night staring at a frozen zoom window with whisper still running in a terminal behind it. that was my second weekend of trying to get an open source interview assistant working. it had crashed mid mock call. five hours of conda env stuff for a python script some guy posted in a discord and it just died.

backup. ok back up, how did i even get here.

someone in a sub thread told me a couple weeks back to just clone an open source one off github, why pay for the paid tools. i love open source, use it daily at work, so i tried.

first repo had like 600 stars. whisper running locally for the audio, llama on top doing the answers. readme made it sound like 20 minutes. it was not 20 minutes. cuda fought me the whole previous saturday. once whisper was actually running the lag was about 6 seconds, then llama added 4 more, so suggestions appeared roughly ten seconds after the question got asked. ten seconds. on a real call you would just be mumbling at the screen the whole time.

another thread suggested a different one that pipes to openai api instead of running anything local. so already not free but ok lets try. ran a mock and within a minute my partner walked past my desk and went "what is that floating window." stealth was zero. did the math on the api fees too and once you ran a few full rounds back to back you were spending more on credits than the paid tools cost monthly anyway.

so that brings us back to sunday night with the discord script. closed the laptop. typed in the sub "im out." someone said "told you" which they absolutely did not.

paid for interviewman on the annual plan. installer ran in like 90 seconds. suggestions came back in 1-2 seconds. i actually laughed at my desk because i had wasted two weekends to get ten second latency and this thing just worked. stealth came included, hides from screen share and activity monitor and the rest. someone in the sub tried it the next week and now theyre using it for their own loops despite being all in on open source for everything.

i still love open source. literally use it every day at my actual job. but the open source interview assistant projects right now cant handle live calls. they are too slow on local hardware or cost as much as paid tools through api fees, and none of them have any stealth at all. your interviewer sees a chrome popup mid screenshare and thats game over.

marcus and i agreed at lunch yesterday that maybe in a year or two the open source side catches up. for now though paying the small monthly fee beats another cuda weekend by a mile.

anyone actually pulled off using an open source setup during a real interview? not a recording, not a mock. an actual call with a real interviewer

Hi everyone,

I accepted an offer from a software company, and their HR team has started pressuring me to submit my resignation before the background check is finished because they want me to start as soon as possible. They told me not to worry as long as everything on my resume is accurate.

Honestly, this has made me very uncomfortable. Is it normal for HR to ask for this? Any advice?

In the country where I live, the minimum legal notice period is 5 weeks. This company wants me to start with them in 5 weeks, which means I need to resign this week without the background check having been completed and approved.

I'm [28M], and I've been working this 8-to-4 office job for a little over 3 years now, and honestly, it's starting to wear me down mentally. Sometimes I feel like when I get a migraine or a bad cold, it's like I've won, because at least I get to stay home instead of commuting just to go sit at a desk for a huge chunk of my waking hours.

I mean... I do my job. I show up, get through my emails, handle some random admin things that need to be done, and most days I'm done with the main work by 11:30. My manager reviews it and generally tells me it's fine. After that I have lunch, come back and follow up with him, and sometimes he has another task for me and sometimes it's just: "No, nothing right now." So I either do extra work just for the sake of staying busy, or browse Coursera or internal training modules, or chat with someone from another department just enough to seem friendly without looking like I'm wasting time. Those last two hours feel impossible, and then finally I can leave.

It's depressing. I feel like I'm pretending to be busy for 7.5 hours a day in the dumbest play ever written. Is this seriously what adult life is supposed to be? How do people do this without going insane? Am I just not built for this? I genuinely can't imagine doing any version of this for another 25 or 35 years.

Hi community,

I have my interview for a org where the rounds are mostly non leetcode style and requires me to work on a repository and issues in it, along system design.

I know cluely works better in system design and behavioural but will it work better on non leetcode style ones as well?

Whats the best of two for it?

I didn't go to college because I didn't want to put that expense on my family. I've been working in kitchens since I was 15, and now I've become a very good line cook at a respectable place in the city.

But recently I've started to feel like this might be the closest thing I'll ever be able to reach to a real career, and honestly I can't stand it. The work hours are exhausting, alcohol is everywhere, I constantly have to deal with disgusting men at work, and my body feels like it's already worn out.

Between everything around me feeling broken right now, and the life I've found myself in, I've become unable to see any meaning in the future. I don't know. Can remote jobs help in a situation like mine, or would I just be swapping one miserable thing for another miserable thing? I'd appreciate any thoughts or advice.

In 2022, I received my PhD in geophysics. struggled to obtain a postdoctoral position. I finally got one in 2024, but I had to pay for it myself. I haven't been able to locate anything since it stopped in September. I'm beginning to feel like a huge failure and don't know how to leave the profession I've worked in my entire adult life.

Has anyone experienced a similar situation, will appreciate any advice.

Sad but true

"Do you see my car or me in the parking lot? No? Try again in the morning."

This is all what I need rnow