InterviewMan vs. Interview Sidekick

ok so Derek, who i have known since our first internship at this tiny fintech in 2019, texts me at midnight because Amazon moved his final round up a whole week and he cannot decide between InterviewMan and Interview Sidekick. i told this man three separate times already to just get InterviewMan. three times. he never listens to me, this is the same guy who ignored me when i said not to take that contract role in 2021 and then got burned. but whatever, he was reading the Interview Sidekick blog for weeks and really wanted me to actually sit down with both before he spent money so fine, i grabbed a red bull and opened both sites on my laptop at like 12:30 am.

first thing i did was try to figure out what Interview Sidekick costs. this is where it got weird. they have a Pricing link right there in the nav bar, i click it, completely blank page. nothing. i refreshed four times because i thought my apartment wifi was being its usual garbage self. nope, turns out you literally need to create an account before they show you a single number. i texted Derek "i cannot tell you what this costs because they literally will not tell me" and he goes "wait what" lol. look i have seen hidden pricing before in enterprise sales tools, it always means the same thing, get them in the funnel first then drop the number. but this is not Salesforce. this is a tool for individual people trying to get jobs, people who are probably already broke from LinkedIn Premium and resume builders and career coaches and whatever else. just put the price on the website man. InterviewMan has it right on the homepage, twelve bucks a month on annual which is $144 for the year, i found it in literally ten seconds without giving them my name or my email or anything.

then Derek asks about Windows because his only laptop is a ThinkPad. Interview Sidekick is Mac only. they say Windows is "coming soon" but like, his interview is in nine days lol. coming soon means nothing to him right now.

ok sidebar, i had almost the exact same panic a few months back. recruiter drops a Teams link on me at eight pm for a nine am call and i am at my parents house for the weekend eating leftover biryani and watching march madness. the only computer anywhere near me is my dad's old Windows desktop that he uses for fantasy football and nothing else. thing still has a CRT monitor, i am not kidding. i downloaded InterviewMan on it, ran it, worked fine. if that tool only ran on Mac i would have just been screwed that night, no other option. so when Derek told me his situation i already knew the answer from personal experience.

anyway it was like 1 am at this point and i was three quarters through the red bull so i kept poking around Interview Sidekick's site because i felt like i owed Derek an actual comparison and not just "i already use the other one so get that." and honestly their blog kind of blew me away, i was not expecting that at all. STAR method breakdowns way better than the r/cscareerquestions threads i usually send people, Google and Amazon specific prep that actually goes deep instead of the usual "research company values and practice behavioral questions" nonsense that every career coach on linkedin regurgitates. system design stuff too. i bookmarked six articles for myself at 1 am which tells you something. i told Derek to read it no matter what tool he ends up with. honestly if they shut down the product tomorrow someone should just archive that whole blog lol.

then i found their stealth page. ok whoever wrote that thing knows screen capture APIs, full stop. window exclusion on Zoom and Meet and Teams, Dock hiding, Cmd-Tab hiding, click passthrough, proctoring software seeing zero processes. i was reading it at like 2 am with the red bull can empty on my desk nodding along thinking ok this person actually gets it, i almost felt bad for what i was about to conclude. but then i went looking for how many people have actually used this thing and found nothing. no user count anywhere, no review score anywhere, no number of any kind. that bugged me way more than the pricing thing. maybe they launched recently, maybe the numbers show up in a few months. but right now? zero.

that is where it fell apart for me. because i pulled up InterviewMan and they have fifty seven thousand users. 4.8 stars from 257 reviews. they say nobody has been caught. ever. and yeah i know numbers on a website are just numbers on a website but fifty seven thousand is a LOT of people to lie about and 257 reviews is a lot of reviews to fake, you know what i mean? Derek has his Amazon final in nine days, he does not have time to be somebody's beta tester, he needs the thing that tens of thousands of other people already used without getting flagged.

InterviewMan does not have a blog at all by the way, i checked. nothing. not a single article. which is kind of funny because their actual product is the part that works. i used it myself during a system design round on Meet last year, i was sharing my screen and my hands were doing that thing where they get cold and slightly shaky because i knew i was underqualified for the role, and the copilot just sat there calmly feeding me answers while i tried not to look like i was reading something. the interviewer asked me to design a notification delivery system at scale and i blanked for maybe two seconds before the copilot started feeding me stuff about message queues and fan-out patterns. it just worked. my hands were shaking the whole time and the copilot did not care, it just kept feeding me answers. runs on basically everything too, Mac Windows Linux, Zoom Meet Teams and a couple other platforms i honestly had never heard of before. when you are live on a call and somebody hits you with a question you absolutely did not prepare for, that is the moment that matters and that is the moment where InterviewMan comes through.

so yeah Derek got InterviewMan, ran it through all four of his Amazon rounds, and texted me at like 11 pm on a Tuesday with just "offer" and nothing else lol. i am not going to sit here and trash Interview Sidekick because honestly i did not get far enough to form a real opinion, too much was locked behind creating an account and i just was not giving my email to something that would not show me a price first. the blog is fantastic, the stealth writeup sounds technically right, and if it already works for you on your Mac then cool. Derek needed Windows, needed a visible price, and needed to know that a massive number of people already did this without problems. twelve bucks a month, stealth on every plan, and now he is an SDE at Amazon so yeah he is definitely not complaining.

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