I drink before I interview
I know some of you can relate, when I have to interview I feel a terror come over me. It's immobilizing. A simple algorithm question becomes impossible because I don't have access to my prefrontal cortex, instead it's all fight or flight, sweaty hands, and panic.
I found with covid I can now do the onsite portion with a little wine in my mug and answer the questions with access to my whole brain, since it's all over zoom.
When I told this to a friend they said they use beta blockers.
Can anyone relate? There doesn't seem to be another way to get work in the tech industry. There is not much relief for those of us with anxiety.
213 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 401 ms ] threadXanax, from what I've heard, can be extremely addicting so I don't really recommend that stuff. One doctor I saw told me that he NEVER prescribes it unless the patient is terminally ill - and that patient was my dad with terminal brain cancer. Was a massive help for him. I'd never touch the stuff myself after that conversation. But there are other options. There's Paxil (see other comment), and even blood pressure medication can be used off-label for anxiety (propranolol is what I'm on right now and while it's not nearly as effective, it does help a little bit).
Anyway, the point here is that the condition you may or may not have is irrelevant, your doctor is the one who should be making that call, and whatever tools they've got for treating social anxiety may be useful for you here as well. You may not need to stay on them long term at all - you can assess that later on after the economic uncertainty has passed. But for now, if you can swing it, I strongly suggest seeing a good doctor to help you have some better options beyond a glass of wine.
But if you can't, then hey, again, no judgement. Gotta do what ya gotta do.
For a L-O-T of other humans, just having an unbiased listener is a positive event in their life.
That said, I do NOT judge you for using a glass of wine to get you through a pinch in a tough time, and to hell with anyone who does. Use what you've got, get the job done. When you're through hell, THEN you can focus on the better long-term option. But for now, do what you gotta do.
That said, IF you have access to a licensed psychiatrist who can prescribe something, you could use goodrx.com as a temporary stand-in for insurance. I'm seeing prices for genric paxil (paroxetine) at 30 tabs of 40mg for about $22 bucks via CVS with GoodRX here in Texas right now, so it may be an option for you. That said, it does take time to kick in, and mixing with alcohol is ill-advised. Still, I do suggest this as your main option, but again, no judgement for doing what ya gotta do.
Good luck to you, regardless.
The difference with my story is that this was at a recruitment event and the beers were supplied by the employer for all the attendees, but nevertheless yes I can relate.
Besides alcohol, there are other alternatives:
- beta blockers as you've mentioned (though you really need to know your normal blood pressure and/or consult with a doctor).
- L-Theanine works really well (without any coffee).
- nicotine (hit-or-miss since it's an upper for some and downer for others, these are cigars no cigarettes, should not contain any additives but tobacco alone).
If I got a high score, I would get the job. That meant leaving the barracks, not having to wear a uniform, and flying around the world pretending to be a serious adult doing serious things.
Before the interview, which was held with a panel of two native speakers, my supervisor told me to drink some beer. I had two Tommyknocker Nut Brown Ales. At lunch, about an hour before the interview I just pounded them, didn't even taste them (they're good), because that's all I had.
I honestly don't remember the interview (and didn't at the time-- due to stress not intoxication) but apparently words came flowing out from me like water in a fast-moving river. I told jokes. Talked constantly for 30 minutes.
I scored a 3, which was high enough to pass, got the job and got to fly around the world pretending to be a serious adult doing serious things.
A little, A LITTLE, ethanol goes a long way.
FWIW, i can attest that being slightly inebriated helps one speak a non-native language. My German is much more fluid when i'm tipsy than it is when i'm sober. The difference, in my experience, is that you don't worry about saying everything just right and instead just say things as they come to mind. That leads to more fluid flow of the language rather than pausing every few words to consult one's mental dictionary.
The idea that “prescription meds” (a group containing everything from antibiotic eyedrops to morphine) should somehow blanket be considered “worse” than alcohol (usually simply because alcohol is available without a prescription) is a little bit of silly and unscientific bias itself.
I also know a lot more alcohol addicts resulting from self-medicating for anxiety than I do benzo addicts from self-medicating for anxiety.
Sure, but we're talking about OP's "mug with wine in it" during the span of an interview, not a pattern of drinking to excess.
> Alcohol, as a drug, strictly speaking, is one of the worse ones.
Citation needed? Certainly it's worse than some potential prescription options out there, but... c'mon, it's alcohol. Humanity has been using it for millennia. As long as there's no abuse involved, a mug of wine during an interview sounds like the definition of harmless.
Humanity has also been using refined carbohydrates, woodsmoke, theism, and fossil fuels for millennia. The fact that something has been around for a long time does not mean that it is not bad and harmful.
There is no amount of “harmless” alcohol consumption. Alcohol is unambiguously bad for human health.
Regardless, if a glass of wine is enough for you, it seems silly to go through the trouble of getting a doctor to diagnose you with anxiety and prescribe something for it. A lot more work for... what, really? Sure, if you actually do have a general anxiety problem, it's probably a good idea to get that checked out. But if you just get anxious in specific rare scenarios (like interviews), that seems like overkill.
I’ve used .25-.5mg clonazepam in interviews, which is a low dose (think 1 beer). Clonazepam is ideal since it has a long half life and will last an entire day of interview rounds. Benzos can leave you pretty sharp without dulling you down or leaving you silly or clumsy like alcohol. Also, people won’t be able to smell them on you. They remove the background noise and allow me to focus on the task at hand. I haven’t tried beta blockers.
The whole interview song and dance is ridiculous nowadays.
One of the worst things about generic drugs is that the dosages (maybe even the molecules) can vary from manufacturer to manufacturer. The FDA rules are that drugs need to be within 80% of the stated dose, but in my experience that's not the case. Maybe you got one of the "good" batches. It's a serious problem for people with diseases that require precise dosing, epilepsy for example, since they depend on medicines like benzodiazepines that can have serious withdrawal effects.
https://xkcd.com/323/
I compete in pistol shooting at an amateur level. I have never been even slightly intoxicated when shooting a firearm. But I shoot 10m air pistol[1] at home for practice, and I've tried it while a little tipsy. So I can tell you that for sure, 3+ drinks will have you thinking you're doing well when in fact your vision is so delayed from reality that you cannot call your shots accurately. You'll think it was a good shot and it was a 7.
But one or two drinks in, there is a small performance boost. It comes from not 2nd-guessing yourself. You just hold on target and watch it happen.
Pistol shooting is a lot about quieting the mind because nobody can hold the gun perfectly steady. You get the best results from accepting a little bit of natural wobble, and smoothly operating the trigger during the smallest part of that wobble pattern. If you try to shoot the gun right as the sights cross the bullseye you will typically throw the shot off badly. Even if you don't yank the trigger, your reaction time is such that the wobble has moved on by the time you react to it looking perfect, so you end up grouping all around the 10 ring instead of in it this way.
The other thing you'll do in pursuit of perfection is hold too long on the target, not happy with how large your wobble is. You end up holding for 10+ seconds and by the time you break the shot your vision is suffering from the Troxler effect[2] and your hold has gotten worse, not better -- you just think it's good because you aren't seeing it as clearly.
It is best to steadily break the shot not at a specific instant, but anytime within your mostly 9-ring ideal wobble area. You settle into this good wobble zone for a few seconds, perhaps from 3 to 7 seconds after putting the gun on target. By Gaussian distribution you will shoot a lot of 10s, a fair amount of 9s, and a scarce handful of 8s.
But I cannot tell you how hard it is to convince yourself to do this! The mind thinks it can make the gun fire when it touches the 10. It also thinks that the wobble is way, way bigger than it really is, and that you'll shoot 7s if you let it happen. You'll even panic subconsciously right before the shot breaks when it looks "imperfect" and twitch to try to fix the alignment at the last moment -- always terrible.
A little depressant makes it much easier to relax and confidently break the shot in that "good enough" zone. Don't get me wrong, it'll never turn an amateur like me (520 - 550, depending on the day) into a top shooter (580+). But it does make it easier to perform on the 540+ side of my average.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISSF_10_meter_air_pistol [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troxler%27s_fading
I believe this is even reflected in some video games, where drinking will give you “deadeye” for a period, rendering your shots more accurate.
Yes, certainly.
On a multi-day trip where the vast majority of the time is spent not seeing anything, and a vanishing percent is seeing something very briefly and needing to ready your gun, calm your nerves, aim, fire, in less than a second... you find any way possible to minimize time spent in the "calm your nerves" portion and improve the accuracy of the "aim, fire" one.
If that ties in with improved mood during the "not see anything" potion, even better.
Something about being high made me listen more carefully. I could actually pay attention, block anxiety, and think properly.
Just don’t slip into dependency. It’s a very slippery slope…
Indeed, tread responsibly.
Zooming out a bit though, maybe "work" or "making money" could be considered a drug or similar - don't want to overdo it there either.
If I'm not stressed though, I am basically a complete fucking mess mentally. I can only really function at a high level if the stakes are high. This is why I graduated with a 2.9 GPA, but scored in the 94th percentile in my exit exams. I guess nobody gets it all, lmao
I can focus very well in interviews or exams. They are even fun for me. But when I get the job and I don't have any concrete deadline, it's hard to focus for me and "get things done". Which ends up me thinking I am not good enough and falling into depression again. I can perform when I absolutely have to, but I never figured out how I can make it work outside those environments.
I also experienced a variation of it when I did karate. During sparring, once my sparring partners hit me for the first time, I was able to start focusing on sparring and not the fear of being struck.
https://www.thecrimson.com/column/a-night-at-the-symphony/ar...
I have ADHD, not sure if this has anything to do with it.
But the high levels of arousal does show up in other ways. Higher heart rate, extra sweating, suppressed hunger, difficulty sleeping that night unless I find a way to destress. It's not something that my mind and body can sustain for weeks at a time. It's important to remember to take care of yourself and choose the stressful moments that matter.
I wish I had some help for tests, my brain is completely disabled. I either know the answer by heart (i have a terrible memory, so that's still bad) or my ability to reason is completely gone.
I envy your skill!
I have a different philosophy. I assume I will NOT get the job so therefore I'm not very stressed.
Let's me feel very free during interviews and I'll say whatever I think. I'll make jokes and I'll even call out the interviewer if they ask something crazy "okay I'll answer but did you just Google that question?".
I once had an interview where the guy said "we only hire the best and brightest here, and you might be a good fit, what do you think about that?"
I said "I don't think this a good fit for me". The guy was bewildered. I said "yeah I want to work with the dumbest and laziest people. I think I'm pretty good but if I'm competing against the best it's going to be harder to stand out. I'd rather work with the worst"
He was really floored and laughed and told me he really respected my view though. Idk, if I had worried about doing a good job I wouldn't have said that.
I'm not sure what my point is but I guess it's just that if you don't worry about getting it you won't be as nervous.
I apply that philosophy as much as I can. I get good results. But from time to time I get excited about some prospect of a job (or anything else) and thinking that doesn't feel so good.
I'd rather just say "It's a job, I might like it for a while, it might have some big benefits, but even if I really enjoy it it won't fix everything in my life".
This allows me to be excited but not overly so.
It does make me less social though, since I automatically assume people don't want anything to do with me and I won't initiate any contact, even in cases it's likely not true. This would have been a problem if it mattered a lot to me.
I forced myself to never beg, always be willing to walk away, accept that I might not get the gig and generally try to not let the other party know of my desperation. It worked wonders on my confidence in negotiations and kept me from taking bad deals that would have prevented me from getting better ones.
I’m be no means saying that is easy. It really is not, but it is something that can be learned.
Drinking, or using substance, to control your emotions is a dangerous path to go down. It let me to develop a habit that I luckily were able to break before it turned into a bigger problem.
I have been desperate before but I wasn't aloof. This is just the tactic I use when it's not life or death.
I used to be deathly afraid of public speaking. But I assume I'll bomb (though I usually don't) and I'm okay with that. It's fine, people make mistakes. Now I don't have an issue with it. You still have some adrenaline so you can perform well but you don't have the dread.
This post is an alarming data point showing that leetcode style interviews are damaging to people's health and need to be removed as soon as possible.
I personally dealt with the same issues but have refused to use any medication or alcohol to deal with the stress of performing under time pressure. None of this should be necessary.
Sarcasm aside, I’ve started interviewing people with “mock work day” style materials and it’s been pretty effective at determine who has been doing this for a decade, who can do this with a couple months to ramp up, and who is entirely faking it.
I’ll have folks combing through mock stacktraces, creating a new endpoint, connecting to a local database, and even doing a little bit of multithreaded design. I’ll assess completion against quality of the solution and factor in how long it takes someone to complete it.
Lots of this stuff is language agnostic, so I keep that in mind too. For example, a stacktrace is a stacktrace in any language. However, we usually don’t extend offers to folks doing things for the first time, as we need a quick ramp up.
We generally don’t find it too big an ask for engineers to be familiar with the basics of Spring, or can SSH into and debug remote boxes. If someone doesn’t know this, they’re generally a college grad. Otherwise, unfortunately, it’s not the talent we’re looking for.
If you do not have code, then first create a small project. That can be done in a week or two. This requires less time than grinding leetcode.
Some people will say: but you need to be able to solve a problem in under a few minutes. That is utter bullshit. We all know that development doesn't work that way in reality.
Back in the day, it was normal to get your former boss to sign off on showing a piece of code in your next round of interviews.
This filters out the best
And if you created a huge incentive to fabricate personal projects, a cottage industry of people who will create something cool on your GitHub in a way that looks authentic would spring up, and you'd be prioritizing people with the wealth and inclination to cheat over other candidates.
all the arguments you give are the same for leetcode prep. the difference is that if it is your own code that you walk through you need to prep a lot less. and that is good because in your situation you would not be able to grind hundreds of irrelevant problems in your spare time for each interview.
as far as your cottage industry argument… you can tell if someone did not write his own code and the system is being gamed right now anyway by people taking interviews for others and so on. and this thread shows people are medicating which is the worst.
Other people's lives differ from yours in ways that are difficult to imagine. Plenty of people have a career in programming without ever going to college. Just because one can't imagine it doesn't make it invalid, or even that it is one's business. If it isn't about their job performance, don't measure it.
> all the arguments you give are the same for leetcode prep.
An interesting point, but of course I wasn't defending leetcode interviews, I was responding to your assertion that people who have the requisite skills necessarily have free time, and the subtext that any time not spent working was available for more working.
Lots of bullshitters out there will find some code they don't own, study it and become well-versed in how it works, and fake their way through.
>If you do not have code, then first create a small project. That can be done in a week or two. This requires less time than grinding leetcode.
Do you mean one of those "interview projects"? Lots of people, especially on HN, would balk at this as "blah blah don't do free work". Those same people will then go back to your first point and say "just evaluate people on their experience.
You may see Donald Knuth once in a career. It's rare. Don't expect it from everyone.
As an interviewee I use badly copied FAANG style as a red flag. Most will cargo cult interview styles copying what they've seen without thinking much about it. I've seen people memorize and pass interviews because Gayle Laakman McDowell's book was so overused. Do we really believe memorizing the book is better than not testing everyone exactly the same? I don't.
As a person who's sat on both sides of the table, I'm a huge believer in technical conversations, but I believe that's very different than code. To me, programming is not a performance art.
I recommend a few things:
1. Ask for sample code, preferably with git history showing that the author did most of the work or it was pairs or something like that. Ask lots of code review questions: why, how, alternatives, etc. Public github repos are fine. Private git repos are fine too. It's the history that tells the story both in terms of code frequency, velocity, revisions, tests, style, etc. 2. Use a pull request style in which the interviewee is the reviewer: what's wrong with this code? How should it improve? Is it good enough for MVP? What about production? Good opportunity to test whether they can speak truth to power when you show them rubbish that is patently wrong. I always hated reviewing bosses code when I had to march into their office and tell them they needed to fix their broken class inheritance or whatever. Interview is a good time to test for assertiveness. 3. Use pairs style where the interviewer is the keyboard/mouse driver and the interviewee is the navigator/commenter keeping the driver on track. 4. Ask them to bring their own hw/sw stack. Examine the choices and reach your own conclusions asking questions about why/how they arrive at their stack when no one is guiding the choices but them or their influencers. They don't really need to do much, more than a show/tell, explaining choices and why/how. To me, this is really interesting philosophically, particularly if it gets into stuff like *nix that are not the typical ubuntu, fedora, etc. and go off into arch derivatives or left field in a telling, R&D way such as shell, package managers, tmux, language, lint, tests, and so on.
Hope this helps.
It was a leetcode style interview (maybe it was through hackerrank? I dont remember), but it was just writing code to hit a JSON-based HTTP API and collect the results into a list. I was encouraged to google things, and explain what I was thinking about in relation to the task.
The task was trivial if you've done it before, but probably not easy if you didn't know how to write code. While doing that task, I was able to expand on my knowledge by talking about what my code was doing.
It was in python, and I was doing it recursively (because that's what I like), so I was talking about how performance optimizations would be to make it iterative instead, if needed. I got into explaining this was because python doesn't have TCO recursion, so it just blows up the call stack if it's too large.
The interviewers were chatty, and were happy to banter and in general be cordial during the interview as well, which I really liked.
At the end of it, I felt really good about the interview and was confident that I had "passed".
I stated my point badly, obviously anxiety is not rational, but on a rational level the stakes of a job interview are quite low (you can take another). It's not like stage fright where if you mess up your performance you could lose your job - you'll likely never see these people again. In that respect it's a bit closer to social anxiety.
Yes, we know it doesn't make sense to be stressed about it, and yet we still are stressed. Saying that we shouldn't be is not constructive IMO.
You can lower your resting heart rate naturally through exercise over time, and meditation and breathing techniques with practice give you control of your heart rate in the moment.
Look for lower pay at smaller companies outside of major markets if you're looking for something without that aspect. You can often set the terms.
The most complex stuff I have been asked were things like “what’s your process for improving application performance” or “what’s an n+1 query”
I assume if I was asking for $250k at a mega tech company, it gets a lot harder.
Great you had such easy questions for your 6 figure interview though.
Was actually called by one of their recruiters, I think she found my linked in because I call myself a “linux enthusiast” on there, and sometimes I wonder if I should take that down but I haven’t yet. I guess I also messed up by telling executive dude that I was more of an relational db guy than nosql guy. Should’ve said something about mongo level webscale :)
I think some of us, especially caffeine addicts with high social anxiety, can benefit from a drink before making that business call we don't want to deal with. I often think better and am more lucid (and way chiller) after one or two beers. Self medicating isn't the end of the world; other medications for anxiety are a lot harder to dial in correctly. But you do have to watch out and make sure you haven't overmedicated, which is difficult. Alcohol has a way of driving your gauge for yourself out of whack very slowly in a way you don't notice.
An anecdote from my father, who was a lawyer in the 1960s. He never ate breakfast or lunch. He just drank coffee. He let himself get ramped up all day and waited until 3pm to start calling opposing lawyers to negotiate settlements. By that point, he said, they'd all had a martini or two at lunch and just wanted to go home, giving him the edge. Of course, at 5pm sharp he was a regular alcoholic like everyone else. To him, though, this represented a very high level of self control.
All the interviews I’ve taken in the last 10 years have been with passing interest on my part. And I go into it more as an interview of the company, and much less care about if they think I’m hitting some arbitrary bar. For me its been a pretty freeing approach. If they pass on me, I can respect that I wasn’t a good fit (and the feeling was probably mutual). And like someone else posted in the comments it allows for me to completely disregard stupid questions.
I recognize that it’s a luxury to have that kind of approach. Additionally I think drinking prior to an interview is completely fine.
This is honestly how I've treated every interview. I'm mostly concerned about whether the position is a good fit for me. I treat the questions they ask me as if I was chatting with a coworker since I figure that shows them what I'm like to work with.