• 10 Dec, 2025 *

Yesterday I got an email, a response from a company I was interviewing at. It had been a week since I did the final interview out of a total of 3 with one of the managers. Considering the complete garbage state of tech, employment and AI, 3 interviews is actually a low / normal number (pains me to say this), and it wasn’t that awful.

First round was with a talent acquisition lady, she was actually the one that found my profile on linkedIn and came up to me instead of me applying to a role at this company. The interview went pretty normal, she didn’t seem interested and looked like she was just reading questions from a sheet or something. It took longer than I wanted, about 1 hour and a half, she asked a lot of similar and repetitive questions that made it seem like her brain was turned off or that she wasn’t hearing what I was saying (I have a feeling this is intentional, maybe to test my ability to articulate or coming up with different answers? If it is, that’s annoyingly stupid), also lots of behavioral questions like how I act in certain situations, which is not something I wanted to answer. I almost had no voice, ideas or patience near the end, but still, I passed.

Then there was your usual cultural fit test, probably one of the worst things in employment, surpassed only by the next test: having to record yourself answering some questions for an AI to review. This shit almost made me give up, it really brought up the Johnny Silverhand in me. Anyway, I did it, felt disgusting for a moment but I got through it.

Second round was a technical interview, with a pretty chill guy I actually enjoyed talking to, he simply spoke to me like a human instead of a robot filling a form, though It was also quite long, a little over an hour. I didn’t do as well as I hoped, and thought it would end there. I passed.

By this point I started creating expectations. In the past I went into every interview trying to keep a positive outlook and this lead into me creating expectations and getting torn to pieces when it lead to nothing, well not in every one of them, but the ones that had potential or showed some sort of progress. Most roles (probably 80-90%) just ghosted or sent the automatic linkedIn email (don’t get me started on waking up early to work on a Monday and getting 30 email notifications with the same fucking garbage), or didn’t even reply back, which was even worse, you don’t know if they are delaying, interviewing others, have too much on their hands, or simply put your application on the shredder and you mean so little to them that they can’t spend their valuable time answering you. I knew well what I was getting into, but I think it’s natural to create some sort of expectation after getting through these spirit-breaking processes.

The final round was labeled in the email was "Final Interview | Java EE / SE". My experience in Java is 2 years of minecraft modding, so I can do some stuff and understand the basics and how it works, but didn’t have the frameworky/enterprisey company experience I imagined they wanted. I was already really invested in this so I spent a few days really studying Java and trying my best. On the interview, though the manager was a chill guy, there wasn’t a single Java related question, and this threw me off. He was asking general questions like what is REST and it’s pros and cons. I got nervous and started stuttering and didn’t answer the way I wanted, and now I realize why this one only took 20 minutes compared to the other ones being longer than an hour. One week after it I got the email.

I was once again destroyed. I really needed this. It was a remote position, and you can imagine how important that is for someone that spends almost 3 hours per day commuting. It would quite literally change my life. Not only that, but I also spent more than 150 bucks on uber because I live far from work and had to go home during lunch for the interviews, which where online, so yeah it’s expected that I’m feeling this way. This was yesterday, and I let myself feel sad and angry instead of trying to push through it as I did before and it felt a lot better, though I still feel like starting a revolution, destroying capitalism and taking down companies, and wrote this post while listening to Samurai and RATM.

Reflecting on it now, I can see a bit more clearly and at least point out my mistakes and learn from them. Having drawing and playing guitar as hobbies I’m well aware that mistakes are the best way to learn. Failure is a stronger word, like a conjunction of mistakes or a big shitty and important mistake. So in an extremely cheesy way it’s also a big opportunity to learn. To quote uncle Iroh:

Failure is only the opportunity to begin again. Only this time, more wisely.

Another thing that helped me was a video of one of my favorite artists Matt Heafy on failure, I recommend you watch it (and listen to trivium!) even if it’s not something you’re going through currently.

Fun fact, I wrote the Curtain of lies poem after the first interview, thinking that it wouldn’t go anywhere and got angry as part of the process, which reflects on the poem and it’s meaning. It’s basically how companies treat people like chunks of meat in the employment process, especially HR.

It was good to write this down, take it out of my system, maybe someone reading this also experiencing some sort of failure will relate in some way, it’s one of the main points of why I write. Reading through bear blogs and how seeing how they impacted my life reminded me that small actions and words can really affect others, in both positive and negative ways. If you related to this in any way, have a similar experience to share or something that you don’t agree with, I invite you to email me.

#post