After visiting Seattle in July, I noticed that many of my college friends working in big tech had bought or were buying homes. Seattle is slightly cheaper than San Francisco but it gave me hope that maybe someday I could save up enough money for home ownership. If only I could income max over the next few years. Around this time, I also started getting a bunch of recruiter emails, probably something to do with the improving economic situation in the tech and Venture Capital (VC) sectors. As a result, over the last month and a half, I decided to take every single recruiter call and do every single interview with the goal to use them primarily as practice, but also just to test the water.
First, I emailed back every recruiter that had emailed me in the months of June and July to set up initial calls. Some of them got back to me, some of them ghosted me. The worst one was one who tried to reschedule twice before ghosting me. These were all third party recruiters who shopped my resume around to different startups, some of which turned me down, others decided to move forward. Besides the external recruiters, I also reached out to the Director of Engineering at Fermat since I went to their Series C party through an invitation from an ex-coworker. I was also contacted by the internal recruiter for Imbue.
These initial screenings helped me to formulate a script as well as organize my motivations for seeking a new job. Basically, I got really good at bullshitting people to make myself sound like I was the best fit for their company. The goal at this point was to get through the initial screen so I could get practice on technical interviews.
Around this time, I also started doing technical interview prep. I replaced my video game time with LeetCode (LC) practice. I replaced my TikTok scrolling with System Design YouTube shorts. I was surprised by how much easier it is to learn and relearn computer science fundamentals today in the age of short form content. I may have learned more in breadth of system design from YouTube shorts than I ever did from working as a software engineer.
For first-round technical screens, these were my experiences with each respective company:
Imbue
I was expected to set up my own local environment to conduct the interview. No AI coding tools were allowed and I screen shared with a third party interview proctor. It was a pretty standard leetcode style assessment. I’m guessing that they would have given this as an online assessment (OA) before the age of LLMs.
Fermat
Similar to the Imbue interview, this was another LC medium, conducted on CoderPad This was less like an OA since I did it with a member of their engineering team.
Roger Healthcare
I was given an example repo and told to implement some features within 1 hour. These features were basically impossible to implement for a human within the given time frame and the candidate was expected to vibe code. This was a fun one and very reflective of their engineering culture as an AI first company. It was pretty funny to feed the prompts into Copilot and just sit back and watch the clock tick down. I eventually had to bring in the big guns with Claude Code to get it across the finish line.
Loop
This was a phone call with one of the engineers along with CoderPad. On the surface, it seemed to be a pretty generic LC medium question but later I realized that I failed hard because I did not clarify constraints before starting on the solution. The weird part was that it was a phone call and I could have easily googled or used an LLM to solve the problem.
Stepwork
While this was a first round technical assessment, it was also the only technical assessment. It was conducted by a third party interviewer that Stepwork had found through a VC connection. It was split into three parts: coding, knowledge, and system design.
The coding portion tested basic programming concepts. The knowledge portion felt like random trivia. It was very strange because I was sitting in front of my computer and could have easily googled any of the questions. The system design question was fairly high level without delving too deeply into specific technologies.
I moved forward with all the companies but was rejected by Loop. The Loop interview was a good experience because it highlighted my naivete with respect to constraints on LC problems whereas with a real world problem, I would have been much more thorough. Overall, most of the interviews seemed to take into account that candidates could use AI to cheat on LC style questions.
For second-round interviews, each company upped the ante with harder LC questions, system design, and live coding.
Imbue
I was given three LC hard questions to choose from and then collaborated with one of their engineers to try to solve it. This was very challenging and we discussed at length different methods to solve the problem. We never reached the coding portion.
Fermat
This was a system design round. I was asked to design a website builder and deployment solution for said websites. I’ve worked on a website builder before so it was fun to delve into the parts of a website builder and the infrastructure that I hadn’t really thought about before.
Roger Healthcare
I met virtually with one of the founders and was presented with some example code. I was asked to implement simple rate limiting. I read a post on Hacker News about different rate limiting algorithms before so I was well prepared.
Of these, I was rejected from Roger Healthcare and Imbue. Imbue gave me detailed feedback about my interview and also offered me a second chance which I eventually turned down. Roger Healthcare sent me a generic rejection email but if I had to guess the reason, it may have been something I said about vibe coding.
I had one final round with Fermat where we reviewed my past projects. After that, I had two weeks of radio silence before they finally responded saying they had up-leveled the position I was applying for and removed me from the pipeline. Seemed like a huge waste of time for both them and me but it was likely coming from the top down.
Rejections are always hard to take but I appreciate Imbue for being transparent and giving good feedback on what I could improve on. Thankfully, I actually got rejection emails from all of them. In the past, I’ve talked to startups who have ghosted me after one or two rounds.
As for recruiters, there were two that I would like to highlight.
Gabriel Nadj and Aaditya Jain at Employia did an excellent job with my initial screening. Both are recruiters but Aaditya seemed to have a technical background so I could go into more depth about my experience instead of giving a high-level overview as I normally would to a non-technical person.
Zen Mak at RallyWorks had a personal touch that I wasn’t used to but came to greatly appreciate. Typically, I try to distance myself from recruiters and interviewers as interviewing can be dehumanizing at times. With this in mind, I was initially confused by Zen’s friendliness but it eventually overcame me.
Throughout the past month and a half, I would sometimes wake up to my heart pounding with anxiety. I was averaging 5 calls a week, sometimes multiple technical interviews back to back. Talking to someone new everyday, turning on the charm, and having to constantly repeat the same introduction to the recruiter, and in subsequent rounds of interviewing was exhausting. Technical interviews were also mentally draining, I would leave the interview feeling defeated, even if I did well. My only reprieve was the climbing gym where I could disconnect from my work life and hang out with my friends. Around this time, I was also searching for a new apartment. The summer rental market was brutal. I spent hundreds of dollars and received multiple rejections as the AI startup boom and Return to Office began jacking up rent across the city. I realized that I didn’t have to do this to myself so I started winding down interviews.
I’m still getting recruiter emails but I’ve stopped responding for the time being. I got a lot of good practice with interviewing on both soft and hard skills. I’ve also realized that my original goal of income maxing for home ownership was kind of pointless and that a job is much more than the dollar amount it provides.
I met my girlfriend’s uncle while we were in Seattle and he gave us a tour of his office. He would smile and say “Hi” to all his coworkers as we walked through the halls. We ended the tour on the rooftop overlooking Bellevue. He remarked that he’d been working there for more than ten years and that he really loved his job. I want a job like that, somewhere I can work and love to work for that long.