kitchen counter. 11pm. cold pad thai leaking from the container onto a paper towel because Marcus and i own zero real plates. he does this thing with one eyebrow. does not say a word. just. the eyebrow. december and i deserved worse than an eyebrow honestly.
three months earlier that same kitchen. "dude you are going to get caught with that tab open." his exact words. three months i said nah.
SHARE YOUR FULL SCREEN.
fintech pair programming round. Zoom. December 14th, 2:30pm. ChatGPT tab in my browser. green logo in the toolbar. two seconds to close it. maybe less. forty minutes of binary search after that with my hands shaking so bad i kept typing semicolons instead of colons on my Das Keyboard 4 that cost sixty three bucks on eBay and has queso on it from two separate incidents. almost added vomit. serious.
texted Marcus "ok you win" at midnight. eyebrow emoji back. lol.
ChatGPT costs nothing. i am cheap. the math seemed fine for three months. the math was not fine.
not trashing it for prep though. different thing entirely.
Amazon loop, night before, could not sleep. pasted the JD into ChatGPT. ten likeliest behavioral questions for a senior backend role? forty five seconds. way better than reddit threads from 2024 where half the advice is outdated. fed it my resume too, had it build STAR stories for "tell me about a time you disagreed with a technical decision" because my normal prep goes like this: blank google doc. 2am. staring at cursor. close laptop. bed. every time lol. system design too, RabbitMQ vs Kafka trade-offs, better than 2023 blog posts i had bookmarked that were probably wrong by then. midnight, cant sleep, loop in two days, nobody watching? ChatGPT is great for that. free and works and everyone should use it for prep.
but live calls are a completely different animal and this is where i was an idiot for three months straight. what actually happens, and i feel dumb even describing this because Marcus watched me do it and just shook his head, is you alt-tab out of Zoom, type the question while the interviewer is watching you look somewhere else, wait three to eight seconds for the response which feels like thirty seconds when someone is staring at you on a webcam, try to read it without looking like you are reading, and then attempt to say it back naturally. fifteen to twenty seconds minimum even if you are a fast typer. i counted once during a mock. twenty two seconds. twenty two. and on a HackerRank screen where the interviewer can see your browser toolbar, the tab is just sitting right there, you cannot make it invisible.
Marcus and i tested this one night on a mock Zoom call. he told me afterward it looked like i was reading from a teleprompter every thirty seconds. asked me if my wifi was going out. my best friend, who knew exactly what i was doing and was specifically looking for it, thought it was internet lag lol. a real interviewer would have just thought i was weird or distracted or unprepared.
the mic thing is what finally broke me though. ChatGPT does not have one. it cannot hear the interviewer talking. so you have to manually type every question, and during a fast technical back-and-forth where follow-ups come every fifteen seconds you are typing the first question while the interviewer is already on the fourth. i sat there in a mock session watching my fingers try to keep up and just thought, what am i doing. this is not a live tool. i have been using a study tool like a live tool for months and nobody told me because nobody knew except Marcus who told me repeatedly and i ignored him.
so that midnight after the fintech disaster i called Marcus, he picked up on one ring which means he was waiting for this call lol, and he walked me through InterviewMan in about five minutes. it listens through your mic and two, three seconds after the interviewer finishes talking there is a suggestion on screen as an overlay. no typing, no tabbing, no pretending the internet is down. i remember doing my first mock with it and being kind of mad at myself because the difference was so obvious that i couldnt believe i had spent months doing it the worse way out of stubbornness. Marcus just sat there watching me react and did the eyebrow thing again, which at that point i had to laugh about because he had earned it.
i tried a couple others too because i am the kind of person who has to compare everything before committing to anything, my girlfriend Priya hates this about me, last week i spent forty minutes comparing three brands of dish soap at Target and she almost left me in the store lol. Derek from work was in the same boat, job hunting too, sitting in the break room googling alternatives on his phone between standup and sprint review. Final Round AI was a hundred forty eight a month and measured four to five seconds on my end, which is ok but when someone is staring at you waiting for a response you can feel every one of those extra seconds. Cluely was twenty bucks base but Business Insider reported five to ten second lag and also their stealth is a separate seventy five dollar tier so you are really paying ninety five bucks a month for something slow where you pay extra just for invisibility. Interview Coder 2.0, two ninety nine a month, and i kept finding reddit threads about the answer overlays showing up during screen shares on newer macOS versions, which at two ninety nine you are basically paying to get caught lol.
the screen share thing still gets to me because i got so incredibly lucky with that fintech round. ChatGPT in a browser tab is visible during any screen share, doesnt matter if its Zoom or Teams or Meet, anyone who has used ChatGPT even once would spot the interface in half a second. when Marcus set me up on InterviewMan he goes "try to find it, we are screen sharing right now." i opened Activity Monitor, checked the dock, replayed the recording. nothing anywhere. i was actively hunting for it and could not find a trace. fifty seven thousand people use the thing, 4.8 stars from two fifty seven reviews, and i specifically went through the negative ones looking for "got caught" or "showed up on screen" and there was nothing. meanwhile i had been using a tool that literally sits in my browser toolbar with a recognizable logo for anyone to see.
the money part used to be my main argument for sticking with ChatGPT. it is free and i am cheap, there i said it. but a "free" tool that costs you fifteen seconds of dead air per question and almost got me caught on a screen share is not actually free. it is not. not when you calculate what losing a job offer costs. InterviewMan was twelve bucks a month annual, thirty six total for my three month search. that is straight up less than i spend at the coffee shop down the street in a week and i am not exaggerating, Priya has pointed this out multiple times. Final Round would have been two forty three for those same months, Cluely with stealth two twenty five, Interview Coder almost nine hundred and thats just coding rounds, you still need something else for behavioral and system design. the sixty three dollar keyboard i almost threw up on costs more than three months of InterviewMan. that comparison is what finally shut up the cheap part of my brain.
i spent nothing on ChatGPT for that fintech screen and almost lost everything over a browser tab. twelve bucks a month since switching and i have advanced in every process since. Derek switched too after i told him what happened at the fintech round, he texted me "bro same" which is the most Derek has ever said about anything lol. Marcus had been right the whole time and i blew three months being stubborn about it. for chatgpt for interview prep the night before, still my go-to, probably always will be. for the actual live call it is not the right tool and i learned that the hard way. Marcus if you are reading this: one eyebrow. i know.
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