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Tinker Tuesday for December 23, 2025

This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service

Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I've been on both sides of interviewing. For better or for worse leetcode style stuff has become the standardized testing of hiring. Generally better since you can't really grind leetcode enough and still pass tech interviews if you have a <100 IQ. But it also rewards smart dorks who mercilessly study it but are otherwise shit developers.

You definitely lose people sometimes because they brainfart during one of them, or they get anxious and underperform. More experienced interviewers know this and get a sense fairly quickly if you're going to actually get the right answer if you have more time and lower pressure. The best companies use these very quantitative measures as foils to have more qualitative deep technical conversations and see how well you work together. People get hired all of the time even though they thought they failed the coding interview since they didn't get the right answer or they only wrote out an O(N^2) solution but were clearly on the right track in discussions for an O(N) one and they thought you were cool and reasonable.

Maddeningly, you never truly know why you fail most interviews. Try not to read too much into it if you do.

A buddy of mine who's hiring (but is not allowed to hire in the US) gave me a mock interview and basically told me even basic competence is rare, and the technical interview for a normal company is basically testing to make sure you aren't a complete fraud. Some of the stories he told me about fraud in the hiring process blew my mind with their brazenness.

Yes, there's an adverse selection problem. The people looking for jobs tend to be terrible. (Also if a job opening exists, it probably sucks: good people fleeing a shit show or because incompetent hires were fired.)