i was sitting across from Marcus at a taco spot near his Stripe office holding my third beer when he asked me how many rejections i was at. nineteen. he put his fork down and stared at me. this was mid 2024, 2 for 19, two offers i turned down because the comp was insulting, rejection fifteen had come in the week before while i was eating leftover thai food at 11 PM on my couch and i just laughed at the recruiter email, that laugh where your brain quits being mad lol. Marcus pulled out his phone and showed me a note with eight stories on it. Disagreements, ownership, failures, cross-team wins, tight deadlines. Four sentences each, what happened, what he did, result with a real number attached, what he took from it. He just reads through it on the subway before any interview and by the time behavioral starts he already knows which story fits. i went home that weekend and wrote my own eight in about two hours. And i am not being dramatic when i say it changed the entire dynamic of my behavioral rounds, two weeks later an interviewer asked about disagreeing with leadership and i already knew which story i was going to use before she finished the question. Before the doc i would sit there frozen for twenty seconds trying to think of literally anything.
Then i started recording myself coding. i had ground through fifty easy LeetCode problems and felt ready. Then i hit a medium graph question during a live round and typed in total silence for eight minutes while the interviewer stared at me through webcam. i knew what i was doing but nobody watching could tell because i was not saying a word. So i recorded myself on my phone solving fifteen mediums, talking through every step. Played back the audio and it was rough. Trailing sentences. "Basically" every third line. Long pauses where i skipped explaining why i picked one approach over another. Code was fine. The talking was garbage lol. Practicing both at the same time turned out to be a completely different skill than practicing either one alone. sent one of the recordings to Marcus and he texted back "you sound like you are solving a murder in your head" which, fair.
One company i interviewed at had a CTO who published a post about their monolith migration. i read it ten minutes before the call on the subway, skimmed the architecture section, texted Marcus "wish me luck" and he said "did you read their blog" and i said "literally doing it right now." Dropped a reference to the migration during system design and the interviewer lit up and we spent twenty minutes talking architecture instead of running through scripted questions. ten minutes. that one blog skim changed the whole tone of the call. i do this for every company now, takes ten minutes, Marcus has been doing it for years apparently and never thought to mention it until i told him about that call lol.
On the actual calls i learned some things the hard way. behavioral answers, ninety seconds max. under that i sound unprepared, over that and the room goes cold, i talked for four minutes once at Coinbase and the interviewer stopped nodding around minute two, Marcus told me later "dude ninety seconds, that is the line." Coding, restate the problem before touching the keyboard. "So i need the shortest path between two nodes in an unweighted graph right?" That buys ten seconds of thinking and i have caught misunderstandings that would have wasted twenty minutes. The thing nobody told me is that saying "i am not totally sure but my instinct says X because Y" lands way better than pretending you know. Interviewers do hundreds of these. they can tell.
Anxiety was the thing that took longest to crack. i started applying to companies i did not care much about just to get reps in. By interview ten the panic went from "i cannot breathe" to "ok this sucks but i can do it." But it never went away completely. Marcus kept telling me about InterviewMan, he had been using it at Stripe when he was interviewing around for a raise and said it was like having cue cards that nobody could see. i said no for months because it sounded too weird. then i bombed a round at a company i actually wanted because my brain went blank on a behavioral question, one of the eight from the taco night doc, i had literally practiced it the night before and i sat in my car after for ten minutes doing nothing lol. signed up that week. it sits on my screen invisible to the interviewer and puts up suggestions based on what it hears through my mic, i glance down when my brain empties, ignore it when i am rolling. Twelve bucks a month annual. i tested it myself, checked dock, Activity Monitor, screen recording, WebRTC. Nothing visible anywhere. 57,000 users, 4.8 stars. Cluely wants seventy five bucks extra for the hiding stuff InterviewMan includes at twelve. Marcus was the one who told me about that too, he had looked at Cluely first and said "seventy five dollars just so they cannot see it? are you kidding me?"
i also started writing down every question after each call. Company, interviewer, what they asked, what i said, what i wish i said. After about fifteen entries it was obvious. Weak on system design trade-offs and strong on coding walkthroughs. That log showed me where to spend prep time instead of guessing, same way Marcus showed me the story doc thing. he does the question log too except he uses a spreadsheet because he is that guy lol.
second half of 2024 into early 2025 i went 7 for 23. none of it was one big fix, it was the story doc and the recorded coding reps and reading engineering blogs before calls and running InterviewMan on live sessions and writing everything down after. ten percent to thirty percent on offers. Marcus asked me last week how things were going and i said "remember that taco night? that was the turn" and he just laughed. "told you so." yeah. he was right.
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