interviews drive me bananas
I've probably had somewhere between 20-30 job interviews over the years. While I think my approach has improved, I can assure you they don't get any less stressful.
In my early days of interviewing, I didn't prep too much beyond my background, interest, and some questions. This made behavioral questions my biggest weakness. Although, looking back, I can forgive myself somewhat since I had fewer experiences to draw upon.
Nowadays, I make a doc file for every interview. The job description goes on the first page. The second page has questions I'm anticipating. I either reverse-engineer them from the job description or get an LLM to do it for me. I usually end up with about 10-12 questions, and I write out my responses to each one. If I'm lucky, they'll usually ask 3-4 of the questions I prepared. This process seems to work pretty well for me, but it takes too long.
My worst interview of all time was probably one that happened earlier this year. It was the second round. In the email, the HR person told me "This interview will be approximately 1 hour and will include both technical and behavioral questions." Well, that turned out to be pretty misleading because that interview was 1 hour of technical questions and nothing else. The interviewer didn't even ask me about my background or interest at the beginning of the interview. He said, "OK, share your screen and open a text editor." Then he asked me to write SQL queries in front of him based on a series of hypothetical scenarios. I took a lot of time to think during these questions. There were several ~45-second windows where the call was dead silent as he was waiting for me to type something. After about 10 minutes of this, I honestly stopped taking it seriously, which kinda helped take the pressure off my mind. I got pretty close to stopping the interview early and saying, "Okay, so I think we both know this isn't going to work." But I ended up deciding to stick it through since I felt I already hit rock bottom. He didn't comment my performance the entire time, which felt super awkward, so I guess he was just being nice. Needless to say, I did not get a follow-up.
I was going to talk about my most recent interview (from yesterday), but this post is getting too wordy. The long and short of it is it was really weird because the HR person didn't sound like they even knew what they were hiring for. I asked basic questions about the position and they were like, "Uh, yeah, well the hiring manager said this is primarily going to be a project-based role working in a cross-functional setting..." And before you ask, no, this company is not fake, nor was the interview with a staffing agency. They also gave me a take-home assessment I have to complete by the beginning of next week. It's only one question, but it is one of the most poorly worded, bizarre things I have ever read. So I guess I'm going to fight nonsense with nonsense. Hopefully my decent interview makes up for it.