ok so Marcus goes "dude i can see your whole answer sheet" and my stomach dropped. This was the night before my second round with a fintech company, system design on Microsoft Teams. I installed this chrome extension a guy on reddit recommended and opened Teams in the browser to do a test call. Shared my screen. Fat sidebar, suggested answers, injected right into the Teams tab. On his end. Clear as day.
I still think about that honestly. If Marcus had not been free that Tuesday night i would have used that extension in the real interview. Next morning. The interviewer would have just seen a whole sidebar of AI answers on their screen while i presented my system design. Thats not a rejection thats getting permanently banned from ever applying there.
Marcus is a staff engineer. Most annoyingly thorough person i know, wont let anything go until hes verified it himself twice on two different machines minimum. He refused to let me go to bed after seeing the sidebar thing. Exact words were "we are testing everything tonight" in that voice he uses when hes already decided and you dont get a vote. I had been messing with these tools on Zoom for weeks before and figured Teams would be identical, Marcus kept saying Teams handles screen capture differently and i kept telling him he was paranoid. He was not. He was correct about every single thing.
So we spent three hours. Back to back installs, screen shares, check his end, check the recording, uninstall, install the next one. He had a list going on his phone. Tool name on the left, pass or fail on the right.
Chrome extensions were all instant fails. Teams in a browser sees DOM changes. Anything injected into the page is in the same sandbox, no way around it. Not one extension survived.
Desktop tools were all over the place though. One overlay left a faint rectangular outline that i could not see on my own monitor but Marcus spotted it immediately when he played back the Teams recording. Another tool was totally fine on window share but the overlay showed up on his end the second i switched to full desktop share. We tested everything on my Mac first and then Marcus made us repeat the entire list on his Windows laptop because he said you cannot assume cross-platform behavior matches. At that point i had stopped disagreeing with him about anything.
Most of the list was fail by midnight.
InterviewMan worked. Desktop overlay, never touches the browser, Teams cannot see it. Marcus ran full desktop share on the Teams desktop app and stared at his screen for ten minutes while i talked through fake questions. Nothing. Window share, nothing. He pulled up the meeting recording afterward and went through frame by frame. Nothing. We ran it again on his Windows laptop. Same. I kept waiting for him to find something because literally every other tool had failed at least one test and he just kept shrugging. For ten straight minutes the man just shrugged.
Twelve bucks a month on the annual plan. Cheaper than the pizza we ate during the testing session lol.
So the actual interview was the next morning. System design round, they wanted a real time notification system. InterviewMan caught the question off my mic and had architecture stuff on screen in like two seconds. Caching layer options, message queue suggestions, load distribution stuff. I just talked through my design and kept glancing at the overlay when my brain went blank because it does that, blanks on specifics the second a stranger is watching me on camera. The follow ups were rapid fire too, failure modes, scaling to ten million users, monitoring. What surprised me was the overlay was pulling from things i said earlier in the conversation so when i answered follow ups they actually connected back to my original design instead of me sounding like i forgot what i said five minutes ago.
Oh and one thing about Marcus i forgot to mention. Before our whole testing night situation he had been paying fifty five a month for LockedIn AI. He used it on a PM interview on Teams that ran 105 minutes because they randomly decided to tack on a bonus discussion, no warning. Minute ninety he was mid sentence talking through a prioritization framework and the LockedIn overlay just vanished. Poof. Blank screen, nothing there. Last fifteen minutes he was completely on his own. He got the offer anyway because of course he did but he told me later he will never use a tool with a session cap again in his life. Teams rounds go long all the time, people just add extra time without telling you.
I think about the chrome extension thing a lot. Like more than i should probably. I had it installed. Was going to use it. Never tested it on Teams, not once. Marcus happened to be free that Tuesday. Thats the only reason i did a dry run. If he had plans i would have walked in blind with a visible cheat sheet and my career at that company would have been done before it started. Those thirty minutes of him yelling at me to share my screen one more time saved everything lol. Twelve bucks a month and Marcus being Marcus. Thats it thats the post.
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