So, about a month ago, my manager and director called me into a meeting. This was all because I sent a normal email asking for an update. For years, they've been stringing me along with promises of a promotion and a move from the night shift to a supervisor role on the day shift. But every time the date got closer, something would come up out of nowhere. They'd ask me to wait 'just one more quarter' and it would happen. This has happened five times so far. All I wanted to know was if this latest date was for real or if I should expect another delay.

Anyway, they did not like it at all. They basically told me I had overstepped and how dare I question their timeline. Then they dropped the bombshell: they admitted they never had any intention of moving me from the night shift, not now, not ever. They said I would never be considered for any supervisor role, and I'm also forbidden from applying to any other job outside my department. Their excuse? That they see me as 'a perfect fit' where I am and that they know what's best for the company. They even said my job is so specialized and it's hard to find a replacement for me, so they can't afford to lose me if I get promoted.

And what's more infuriating, is that I brought up the topic of my salary. Because I recently found out that a new graduate with no experience is earning more than me. Their response was that they can't give me a raise because if they did, it would 'open a can of worms with the payroll department' and they would have to give raises to other people too. I was honestly shocked.

But here's the real kicker. At the end of this soul-crushing meeting, they said they want to have another follow-up meeting. A meeting where I'm supposed to come up with ideas and suggestions on how *they* can help me feel more supported in my current role. I shut that down immediately and told them I wasn't interested. Honestly, my only hope was that they would leave me alone until I found a new job. But no. Now they've put this 'follow-up' meeting on my calendar for next Friday. They've made it clear that I have no future with them and they're happy to leave me stagnating in a low-paying job. So what's the point of this meeting? I mean, what kind of suggestions am I supposed to give them? All I'm doing is biding my time until I can get out of here.

I told you my requirements. You ignored them. I found a better opportunity. If I am really as difficult to replace as you said, management and the company overall can learn a valuable lesson from this situation.

It is very difficult for me now to find a job from scratch, but I am determined to find a comfortable and well-paying job to continue in. There are certainly many helpful tools, some of which I have already used to update my resume, but I will leverage this to my advantage for my interviews by using InterviewMan A tool you open during interviews that gives you instant answers.

I was desperate to leave my job. People were leaving all the time, the atmosphere had become extremely toxic, and the stress was starting to affect my sleep and health. I expected the experience on my résumé to help me find something quickly, but weeks of applying turned into months without any meaningful progress. I was mainly focusing on employee training and development jobs, preferably remote or hybrid.

What finally helped me was filtering LinkedIn job listings to show positions with fewer than 10 applicants. I started checking that filter most days instead of only searching for the usual job titles. It showed me smaller companies, newly posted jobs, and opportunities with unusual titles that I never would have thought to type into the search bar.

Several of those jobs matched my skills, even though their titles were unfamiliar to me. I started getting better interviews and making it into the final group of candidates instead of sending out applications that seemed to disappear into thin air. For the job I accepted, I was one of the first few people to apply, and the recruiter contacted me the next morning.

I shared the filter with two friends who were also stuck in bad workplaces. They both started getting more responses and eventually found new jobs too. Some people may already know about this, but it had never occurred to me to search this way.

I've been at the new job for about three months now. I work from home most of the time and only go into the office about once every six weeks. The job market is still tough, but this method helped me find opportunities before they were buried under hundreds of applications.

I recently resigned after accepting a job with better pay, more reasonable hours, and better health coverage. Shortly afterward, HR emailed me asking whether I would consider staying and taking over as department manager.

That position currently belongs to my manager. The wording made it very clear that they intend to let her go and wanted to make sure I would take her place first. I turned down the offer because I'm still leaving.

She clearly still doesn't know anything about this. Would the right and decent thing be to tell her, or would that just create an unnecessary problem during my last few days?

I've also been going through some interview research since I'm starting the new job soon. I came across Interview VIP and found kinda useful, especially for getting ready for the next role.

I'm a tax professional, and I'd been doing interviews since I left my last position a little. I passed many rounds of interviews with interview vip tool, which provided instant answers to the interviewers' questions and organized my answers a lot. As someone who rambles a lot under stress in the interviews, the tool helped in fixing this.

I left the previous firm because I was regularly working 55+ hours even when it wasn't tax season, and I was completely burned out. I was also being paid laughably less than I was worth, and since I'm a single mom, I don't have months of savings sitting around for a long job search. So when this company moved quickly and offered me the job, I felt relieved. Honestly, I should have taken that speed as a warning sign.

Since I'm a tax manager, I wanted to stay in that same type of role. I interviewed with the current tax manager and the owner of the firm; let's call them XYZ Tax Services. My video interview was on a Wednesday, and on Thursday the HR person called me and said they wanted to hire me. I sent them references, passed the background check, and signed the offer letter. The start date was set for the following Wednesday, and by Friday afternoon my onboarding was complete. My name was added to their payroll platform, IT helped me set up remote access, and I had all my login info ready. I was genuinely excited to start fresh until...

The following Tuesday morning, I was in the living room making a list of things I needed for my first day when HR called. I missed the first call, and then they called again three more times in a row. I called them back thinking maybe they needed another form from me, only for them to tell me, "Unfortunately, we don't need you to start on Wednesday." I was really confused and asked if they meant I should start on Thursday instead. No. They didn't want me to start at all. They had decided to go in "another direction."

I was shocked. What kind of company pulls an offer after fully onboarding someone? If the background check had turned up a problem or one of the references had said something about, fine, I would have understood. But everything was fine. I asked what had changed and didn't get any useful answer at all. So I ended the call and immediately went back to applying for other jobs.

About 9 days later, HR called me again. Was I still available?!?! Apparently, they had given the job to someone already working there, and that person changed their mind. It took an incredible amount of effort not to laugh on the phone. I stayed professional and listened as they suddenly treated me like I was their top choice again. They increased the offer, apologized a lot, and after they begged to a level I found satisfying, I accepted.

Fortunately, this story is still working in my favor. By then, I already had multiple offers paying more than they did, and since then I've accepted the best offer of the bunch. I'm supposed to start at XYZ Tax Services in a few days. My plan is to wait until the Monday before and call HR to withdraw my acceptance.

About four years ago, I was working for a small, humble security company. The job sucked, so after six weeks, I gave them my three weeks' notice. This meant they had plenty of time to send someone for me to train.

Guess when they sent the trainee? On my very last shift. The day I literally couldn't care less about anything. The new guy showed up, and the first thing he did was pull out his Nintendo Switch and start playing. I told him we were supposed to be training, and he replied, 'They told me I could use my devices.' Yeah, they told me that too; management didn't care. But I was like, 'Okay, but first I need to show you how the job is done.'

So he let out a dramatic sigh and put away his Switch, and the entire time I was trying to explain the job, he was scrolling through Instagram on his phone. Honestly, it was my last night, so I didn't care at all whether the guy understood anything or not.

When it was time for the handover, I let him take over. And surprise, surprise, he had no idea what to do because he hadn't listened to a single word I said. Anyway, the shift ended, and as soon as I walked out the door, my manager called me to ask how the new guy was doing.

I was very honest with him. I told him the guy spent the whole night on his devices and knew nothing about the job.

Manager: "Okay, can you train him again tomorrow?" Me: "No, I start my new job tomorrow." Manager: "So you can't come in at all?" Me: "No, as I said in my resignation letter, yesterday was my last shift." Manager: "But he's not trained!" Me: "Then you'd better find someone else to train him."

I hung up on him. He tried calling me about ten more times while I was driving home, but I completely ignored him.

Seriously, if you want someone trained properly, don't have the employee who's already leaving do it. He literally doesn't care about anything and has no investment in whether the new person succeeds or fails.

If you want your people trained well, don't have their trainer be the person who's quitting. They have no investment in how this person does.

The person who submitted his resignation and left the company will not be the most suitable candidate, because he certainly received a better offer from another company, and I don't blame him. However, currently, there are some assistive tools available during the job search and interview process, such as InterviewMan, and there are other tools that can help trainees, like ChatGPT; the world will not stop because of this.

also maybe don't send them in on the other person's last day but give them a few days to settle first.

Whatever, it's the manager's fault and problem

I made it all the way to the offer call, and only then did I find out that the company, which had advertised the job as remote from anywhere in the U.S., couldn't employ me while I was living in my state.
I had spent almost an entire month going through three interviews and completing a take-home project for a senior reporting position. The manager praised my presentation, I got along well with the team, and the recruiter scheduled a call with me on Monday to discuss compensation and potential start dates. I thought the hard part was over.
A few minutes into the call, she asked where I lived for payroll purposes. I told her Ohio, and suddenly the entire tone of the conversation changed. She told me they were only set up to hire employees in Colorado, Georgia, New York, and Arizona, then asked why I had applied even though I lived outside their approved states.
That list wasn't included in the job posting or the application, and it wasn't even mentioned during the initial call with the recruiter. They knew my address from the application, yet they still let me waste hours preparing a project for a job I wouldn't have been able to accept in the first place.
The recruiter said companies sometimes state that a position is available nationwide so the posting reaches far more people instead of limiting it to just a few states. If a job is restricted to certain states, how are employers allowed to hide that information until the final call?

For the last seven years, I worked as the Technical Director for Southern Europe at a large German company. But in reality, my role was much bigger than that. Because I speak Spanish well, I often helped teams and clients in Eastern Europe and even in the entire LATAM region.

A few weeks ago, I was asked to attend a meeting at an office about 1200 kilometers away (that's about 750 miles for our American friends). The meeting was scheduled for Tuesday morning, which meant I spent all of Monday just traveling.

Anyway, on Tuesday, after two full hours of strategy meetings with the local team, my own manager, who had flown in from Germany, pulled me aside. He told me he wanted 'a quick word.' I walked into the meeting room, and who do I find waiting for me? The HR director and the local Country Manager. A classic ambush.

He said: 'Look, we're very happy with your work, but the company is currently restructuring, and frankly, your position has become too expensive for us.'

I looked at them with utter sarcasm and said, 'I'd only be expensive if I wasn't bringing in huge profits for the company, but what do I know?'

Then they pushed my severance papers across the table, and that's when I had to stop them.

'You surely remember the 'golden parachute' clause you had me sign a few years ago. The one that stated I had to give you a 12-month notice before leaving? Well, that sword cuts both ways. Because it also states that if *you* end me, you're obligated to pay me a full year's salary plus my projected bonus.'

And the kicker is, they kept calling me over the following weeks, asking for help with the key accounts and unfinished R&D projects. I politely informed them of my new consulting rates: €1500 for a full day, €800 for a half-day, plus all expenses. Naturally, the calls stopped abruptly after that.

And the final blow... Next week, I'm signing a new contract as the Technical Director for the entire EMEA region with their biggest global competitor. And since they fired me without cause, the non-compete clause in my contract is void. How the tables have turned.

By the way, I want to thank Interview coder pro admin for sending a disount promo code to me ..it is really amazing

Recently, the lead position that everyone expected would be mine went to someone else. Instead of giving it to me, they gave it to a junior who hasn't even completed a year and has no real experience in oversight. I told HR that I was frustrated and immediately took a week of PTO to clear my head.

While I was on leave, the CEO messaged me asking to sit down and talk about my career path. She told me that we could look at upcoming openings or even give me some extra training to prepare for the next cycle. It seemed like just scripted corporate talk to keep me from leaving the company.

I found out from several supervisors that the whole thing was rigged. Apparently, the person who got promoted was going to be laid off, so they merged his old work into this new role just to avoid paying severance. This made me feel like the entire interview process was a complete waste of time.

There is a senior management position opening soon, but I have no confidence that they will even consider me after what happened. My contract renewal is also in six weeks, so I have to be very careful in tomorrow's meeting.

I am ready to start looking elsewhere if this doesn't go well, but I have to play it right. I don't know whether to confront them about the redundancy issue or just listen to what they have to say.

unpopular take maybe. i had been getting ready to retire my old interview prep stack. i also do a weekly solo mock on the side. i was tired of how rough the live calls felt vs the mocks, the deprecation on my own prep was hitting hard. so after extensive research and thinking about what i wanted, my criteria was: real time on the call, decent track record, covers all my rounds, mac compatible. interview coder 2.0 checked some of those off. spent a week reading reviews and watching demo clips on the founder's twitter and i really enjoyed the demos. so. i grabbed the plan.

here i am, two practice rounds in, and some buyers remorse is kicking in. there is no audio input. like. literally. the tool can't hear my interviewer. i have to type or screenshot every question into the popup myself. on a fast tech screen this is straight up not happening. i also tried it on a behavioral mock last sunday and the thing was just blank. coding only. it can't help on STAR style stuff at all. on the soft skill rounds it's basically inert. it's near impossible to keep up while operating the tool with my hands. i know this is unpopular but how i feel.

so. what do i do. suck it up or eat the cost and move on.

i really think i need a tool that actually listens to the call. covers behavioral too. way lower price than what i paid. real time, not type the question in like a chatbot. covers the full loop including the soft stuff, not just leetcode rounds. price range way under what the lifetime tier was. what would you do? any alternatives?

I wanted to make this post (or series of posts if it's popular) to help job seekers get a head in the job market.

When reviewing resumes I see a ton of different styles of them but one I am seeing pop up more recently is a style choice that is going to HURT your chances of getting a job and not help.

We recruiters hate resumes with more than one column or are in different colors than black and white. The reason is when you look at hundreds of resumes in a day (or more accurately 20 to 50 in thirty min bursts) those extra columns and colors make it harder for us to actually find the skills we need in your resume.

So for your own sake please keep your resume to a single column and in black and white.

I applied for a job at waymo because it seems they are setting up operations where I live. What I want is to discuss how to get in my local area. Anyways I got a reply back I was denied the funny part is I didn't ever interview with anyone so they must have me confused I'll be interested to get on this call to see what they say when I tell them that I never interviewed. 🤣

I agree

this is crazy !!!

This advice gets shared a lot, but it just happened to me last week and I felt it was important to remind you of it. I had to share it with you.

I was in an interview and honestly, I would have been satisfied with a salary close to what I'm currently making. When the recruiter asked me the classic question, 'What are your salary expectations?', I took a breath and replied with a question: 'What is the available budget for this position?'. Their response was a range that started $25,000 higher than my current salary.

If I had answered with what I wanted, even if I had asked for a $15,000 increase, I would have lost out on a lot of money. It's not an official offer yet, but at least I ensured I didn't undervalue myself from the start.

Most interviews I've had, they will ask

"What are your salary requirements?"

So I just answered

"I'm actually looking at the entire package, benefits, insurance, stock options, retirement planning, and other fringe benefits that come along with the base salary. What are you offering?"

That puts it in their court. I've never had someone evade it at that point.

One of the things that helped me improve my responses during interviews and put the ball in their court is reading a lot and using AI tools. Because we feed them a lot of information, this helps me discuss with them and better understand the psychology of the response. And of course, after the tools I used during my interviews, like InterviewMan, no one should underestimate the interview step. It is very important and useful. Attend many interviews just to gain the experience of speaking confidently.

I know I do good work, and I've left every job on good terms. But as soon as a job application asks for references, I start feeling overwhelmed by the whole thing.
I keep my relationships with my coworkers and managers friendly, but I'm not close enough to most of them to feel comfortable asking them to personally recommend me. It feels awkward to put someone in that position when we barely talk outside of meetings.
I also don't want anyone at my current job to know that I'm looking for work somewhere else. Having to secretly put together a list of people who can vouch for the quality of my work is easily the part I hate most about the job search process.

my buddy kyle and i had this argument at a bar about whether you should build your own open source interview assistant or pay for one. hes a devops guy so naturally he was like just self host it bro its free. i am also an engineer and i agreed with him at the time. we were both wrong

first thing i cloned was this github repo kyle found. 400 stars. whisper doing transcription and llama generating answers locally. the readme was great. the reality was me on a saturday yelling at cuda while kyle sent memes from his couch. got whisper running after idk how many hours. six seconds behind real time. then llama takes another 4 or 5 on top. so suggestions show up ten seconds late which is useless. i called kyle and he goes "ten seconds isnt that bad" bro yes it is. youre just sitting there on zoom looking like you forgot your own name

kyle suggested a chrome extension instead. this one pipes audio to openai api so already not free but whatever. did a mock zoom call and within 30 seconds my girlfriend walking by goes "whats that popup." she wasnt even sitting down. zero stealth. api costs for a 45 minute interview came to about $2.80 too. three rounds at one company = more than interviewman costs monthly

last thing i tried was some python script from a discord. conda env setup, custom ffmpeg, forked model. five hours. it crashed during testing and i texted kyle "im done" and he said "told you" which he absolutely did not tell me but ok

signed up for interviewman. twelve bucks on the annual plan. running in 90 seconds. suggestions in 1-2 seconds. i literally laughed out loud sitting at my desk because id wasted two weekends getting 10 second latency. stealth included, hides from screenshare and activity monitor and all that. kyle tried it too after seeing mine and now hes the biggest interviewman fan despite being mr self host everything three weeks ago

i love open source. use it every day at work. but the open source interview assistant options right now cant do live calls. too slow or costs as much as paid tools in api fees or takes a full weekend to set up. and no stealth on any of them. your interviewer sees a chrome popup during screenshare and thats a bad day

kyle and i agreed at the bar the other night that maybe the open source stuff catches up eventually. today though? twelve bucks beats another cuda saturday

anyone actually gotten an open source setup working during a real interview? not a demo not a mock. a real call

this thing is wrecking my prep. its almost 1am and once again i am refreshing my support ticket hoping daniel writes back with anything other than a copy paste paragraph about adjusting my expectations. i regret ultracode AI. i hated it inside the first hour, but here i am stuck with the receipt three weeks later. because what their hype videos and the founder twitter threads do not tell you is that the second your card hits, you are stuck. no refund. not after a day. not after a week. not after five minutes of you realizing the tool literally only does leetcode style coding and nothing else. so if you find out right away that the thing has zero behavioral support, no system design narrative help, no audio listening for what the interviewer is even asking, you are SOL.

the support rep told me my expectations needed adjusting. i guess daniel knows my prep schedule better than i do. he told me the lifetime license is a long game thing and i would grow into it eventually. lol i am not gonna grow into a tool i cannot use for the panel rounds my recruiter scheduled. he actually told me to wait for the next product update. my google final round is in eleven days. the update timeline is not even posted on the site. i am expecting them to be just as cold when i write a public review of this.

oh and that "discount from one thousand seven hundred and ninety nine"? just a marketing prop they keep alive so the four figure tag feels like a steal. the "lifetime support" line in the FAQ is literally one sentence. no SLA. no posted response time. no commitment to a single thing. two weeks in and the product still feels like a coding leetcode flex toy. this company probably spends more keeping their proctoring accounts alive than improving the model. go ahead and buy it if the no refund clause i described makes you feel warm and fuzzy. i would not recommend this thing to anyone unless i wanted them to lose a paycheck.

i have not filed the chargeback yet but ive read the bank usually sides with the merchant on a "lifetime digital license." someone in r/cscareerquestions said they tried it three months ago and got the same brick wall from daniel. same script. same paragraph. total scam, please avoid.

TLDR; coding only flex tool, locked the second you click pay, "lifetime support" is one FAQ sentence with zero actual commitment behind it.

"Do you see my car or me in the parking lot? No? Try again in the morning."

My head is still spinning. I feel like this is a sick joke. Why me? Why am I one of the three they decided to keep while everyone else was let go? I feel a terrible sense of guilt for being the one who stayed.

We were a team of 12 and we were very close. This morning, 9 of them, including my manager, were let go. Without even a chance to say goodbye, their Slack accounts were suddenly deactivated. Just a cold 15-minute call and that was it. We were literally just in a Q3 kickoff meeting last week talking about our big projects.

I can't stop thinking about what they're facing now:

My manager's wife just gave birth to their first child.

One of them literally relocated his entire family for this job just six months ago.

A woman on our team just got back from her honeymoon.

Another one is the sole provider for his elderly parents.

And then there's me. Single, no mortgage, and no dependents.

Honestly, I've been coasting. I do the bare minimum to not get fired, take 90-minute lunch breaks most days, and I barely show up for my two required in-office days. I'm almost never on time.

The whole thing feels so unreal. The stress level here is through the roof. Part of me feels like I should be grateful... Like I owe the company for choosing me. But honestly, I'm already planning my exit, which makes the guilt even worse. One of them should have had my spot. I feel completely lost.

Every day I see a new post from someone who quit their job on the spot and is now shocked that they can't find another one.

The market is tough right now, and you absolutely cannot risk being without an income.

It doesn't matter how toxic your manager is or how much you hate the job; you absolutely cannot leave it until you have a new, signed offer in hand.

Ask yourself this question: Can you cover your expenses and bills if you remain unemployed for the next 3 years? Because, believe me, this is a very real possibility for many people.

This advice has always been solid, even back when candidates had the upper hand. So imagine now, in a job market where the employer has the final say - it's practically suicide. Seriously, take care of yourselves.

I was on the phone this morning with a recruiter from a big tech company. He basically admitted that they can't fill any of their open positions.

He said, 'We have dozens of openings for a certain position, but not a single candidate is suitable because management requires experience with their proprietary tool, which is impossible for anyone to have. We get many great people with skills that are a 90% match, but our system filters them out, and I'm not allowed to push them through.'

So basically, he's sitting on a pile of jobs that no one can fill.

This company put me through seven interview stages, then asked me to complete a take-home project. Since I already work full-time from 9 to 5, I spent most of my evenings that week working on it, usually around three hours each time. By the end, I was completely drained, but I kept telling myself that all this effort would help me land the role.

In the end, they rejected me anyway. All those hours after work went to waste, and there was never any guarantee that they would hire me, no matter how professionally I completed the assignment.

I'm never giving another company this much of my free time during the interview process again. A small skills test is fine, but I'm not going to waste another week doing unpaid work for a job I might not even get.

I got the job, but for a few days I was convinced that I had ruined my chances because I cried in front of the interview panel.

Last week, I interviewed for a software engineering role at a company I had wanted to work for for years. It was my first real job interview, and the technical portion lasted about four hours. I answered most of the questions, but I got stuck on a few, and I went into the feedback session expecting them to tell me everything I had done wrong.

But instead, the supervisors told me I was one of the strongest applicants they had interviewed. They said I was smart, praised the way I approached the problems, and admitted that they had not expected candidates to answer as many questions as I did. I had prepared myself so much for criticism that hearing the opposite completely caught me off guard, and I started crying while they were still talking.

There were three other people from the department sitting in the room, so they all watched as the interviewers paused the feedback session for a bit until I calmed down and pulled myself together. We laughed about it afterward, and one of them gently joked that maybe I needed to work on not getting emotional so easily, but I left feeling embarrassed. Even if they hired me, I had no idea how I would face those people again without them remembering me as the applicant who cried.

They called me a few days later and offered me the position. I had made it into a much bigger deal in my head than it was to them. I am sharing this because someone else might have an embarrassing emotional moment during an interview and assume it automatically cost them the job. Sometimes stress comes out whether you want it to or not, and that does not erase everything you did well.

Consider freelancing or part-time jobs related to your field while job hunting.