Since late December 2025, I participated in over 20 interviews. First, I tried maintaining a database of all success & failures but I gave up after a while. I only added entry to my Notion database when I went through at least one round successfully. I must have applied at over 100 places and heard back from 20 of them, gave interviews at 15 to 17 places, crossed half-way mark at 6 of them, and had offer from 3 of them. I was shooting for 5 to 10 YoE roles with larger scope if possible.
More importantly, I was looking for positions that were either fully remote or required at most one or two day in office with as little traveling as possible. This removed most of the usual suspect I’d have applied. I was pretty liberal in my applications. It is the best strategy when you have no other strategy.
It seems to me that the single most important factor in my success was whether someone read my resume carefully and liked something on it. At one place, they went through my GitHub and they liked what I saw. During interview, you can almost tell if someone has read your resume or just skimmed though it. When they read it, they jump quickly into the details of a project/work they liked. Since you are talking about things that you’ve done well in the past, you can easily set the tone of the interview. More importantly, you start your interview with a lot of headwinds in your favor.
Other important factor was a presence of a “friendly face” in the panel, especially if the interview is online (most of them were). You occasionally meet people who are unusually nice to strangers, and they try to help them you as much as possible. Perhaps they don’t like to see any kind of suffering in their midst. Bless their soul! Most people on interview panels are usually from schools where competition is a celebrated norm. Which means that they expect you to do handle anxiety and pressure well which I guess is fair if not ideal for me. Sadly, I am not one of those friendly face myself when I am in panel!
I had much better results when interviewers were senior engineer/manager and technically hands-on. These folks are usually more worried about maintaining and running a system than developing new features. The tone of the conversation is immediately set to an abstraction level where I articulate better. I am terrible when HR or non-tech person starts the conversation. I think I am getting better at it. The trick is to answer slowly and nothing more. You can’t have a conversation with a person you don’t share vocabulary/language.
I guess what I am saying that interviewing is a social process. And like every other social process, it is ridden with ambiguity. Things that are easier for other will be hard for you and vice versa. Quite a lot depends on figuring this part out that you can’t unless you had gone through enough interviews without feeling paralyzed. Like any other skill, you need to train for it. AI live interviews (audio mode) helped me a lot. The questions and feedback/response you get from the AI is not the point; the point is that you get to practice and get to notice occasional bullshit you say.
My recommendation is to start interviewing at places where you don’t have much interest in joining (though you’d never know) so rejection doesn’t take as much emotional toll. And you get to work your interview muscle before it matters. If you have friends who are going though interviews, team up.
If you are not getting good vibe from the team during interview, my recommendation is to not join them (if you have a choice, some job is better than no job). I know some people who are genuinely not very interested in interviewing even if they would be excellent co-workers but I don’t think it is worth the risk. “Vibes” reflect culture. Personally, I am against the practice where the team interviewing is different than team hiring you because this model is tilted in favor of large organization and can work against candidates who enjoy being part of a capable team.
For a principal/staff role, and perhaps even for a senior role, you’d do well not to show (or worse fake) interest in something that you’ve no decent experience which could be hard if you are a generalist. Sine they can genuinely find almost everything interesting. I see all of them as software problems, no matter how different is the domain. Whether you are like me or not, it’d help not to do this (perhaps except at early stage startups). Keep focus on things that you are interviewing for and link it to things that you have done before. Closer they match, better are the chances of success at senior role.
If you genuinely excited about the role without having too much experience (e.g. I’d give a shot at Oxide Computers despite not doing any hardware for last 9 years), you may need to clearly articulate why you are excited in football now even though you’ve played hockey, cricket etc. so far. Remember that money they ware willing to pay you correlated with what your are most skilled at and how well it aligns with the job at hand. If you are willing to take a pay-cut then by all means explore new (potentially nearby) territories. I don’t think playing cricket everyday makes you any better as hockey, just like solving puzzles everyday won’t make you any better at combinatorics, let alone at linear algebra. It just shows that you are a good athletes and have what it takes to become a good athlete but I am not paying a price of a good footballer to a no-matter-how-good hockey player. If you willing to come as a rookie football player, fine! I am not yet not convinced that a good generalist could be an excellent specialist with LLM.
Follow the classic advice: you can never over-prepare and work on your resume. I spent weekends preparing for interviews. A friend was going through interviews and helping them also helped me lot. I recommend going though videos that talks about interviews (e.g. Hello Interview channel) if you have not given interviews for a long time. It is good if someone keeps continuously remind you (CRY) what is important. The point behind these exercise to learn how to leave a better impression on people who are going to pay you. To do better, you need to practice. And you can always do better no matter how good you are. Besides, if you can’t put effort during interview, what signal you are sending to your interviewer that says the you gonna put effort in your job?
I’ve been pretty bad as resume, and I still think I am not great at it. I usually don’t find enough excitement working on it (except for occasional urge to use LaTeX). It is tricky to figure out what to add or remove from the resume and what to highlight. I have a resume of a generalist which works well at startup and small enterprises but not at large organizations. Large orgs look for a specific skill. This is a tradeoff I am yet to learn how to make properly.