If the tech job interview came with an honest casting notice, it might ask for a senior engineer who can portray a senior engineer. Must communicate deep enthusiasm for a company discovered Tuesday. Prepare one story about overcoming adversity, with a satisfying ending and no unresolved feelings about the people involved. Compensation discussed after the chemistry read.
I build Advisory Guide, which helps people draw on their own material during live conversations. A good number of our users have used AG during job interviews. Some voluntarily send me transcripts and reach out to explain how it helped them through the moment. They want me to see what happened. I have read accounts of conversations that went well and conversations that were painful. Their willingness to share both has stayed with me.
The interview use case is a recurring headache for a founder trying to explain a broader communication tool. I don't tell my users what to do, and it'll stay that way. People remain responsible for the rules of the interview they're taking. I can be glad someone felt better able to communicate and still wonder why the conversation felt like something they had to survive.
What has startled me is the question those exchanges leave behind: how much of getting hired depends on being able to perform a convincing version of someone who deserves to be hired? These are accounts people choose to share with me, and they have made me pay closer attention to what an interview rewards. The question deserves more than a motivational poster about confidence.
The job market gives applicants plenty to worry about. On October 23, 2026, Indeed's U.S. software-development postings index was about 19 percent below its February 2020 baseline. That's a measure of advertised opportunities, not the unemployment rate for developers (Indeed). The picture is uneven: LinkedIn's October report showed September hiring in its broad Technology, Information and Media category slightly above the previous year's level (LinkedIn). There are jobs. There are also good reasons the search can feel punishing. Requiring candidates to radiate uncomplicated optimism about it strikes me as an ambitious addition to the job description.
Some performance is useful. An engineer has to explain a decision, take a question seriously, and communicate when something is going wrong. A person who can make complicated work understandable brings a real skill. I want that ability on my team. The problem begins when our preferred signals of competence become difficult to distinguish from competence itself.
Imagine asking two candidates about an outage. One gives a clean account with a strong opening, a personal contribution, and a measurable result. The other stops to distinguish what they knew at the time from what they discovered afterward. They correct a detail. They give a colleague credit. Both may be excellent engineers. Depending on what the interviewer rewards, the second person can look less decisive precisely while giving a more careful account. A polished narrative and an accurate one can coexist. We still need to check for both.
Researchers call efforts to influence how others see us impression management. A 2017 meta-analysis by Jessica Peck and Julia Levashina found that self-focused tactics, including self-promotion, were associated with better interview ratings. The tactics can involve presenting genuine accomplishments; the category does not simply mean lying (Peck and Levashina). That seems like a reasonable description of the extra job applicants are doing: making their ability legible to a stranger who has limited time and considerable power.
Then we add the conditions under which they have to do it. In a 2020 experiment, Mahnaz Behroozi and colleagues assigned 48 computer-science students to solve a whiteboard problem privately or in front of an observer while thinking aloud. About 62 percent failed the task in the observed condition, compared with about 36 percent in private. This was one task in a simulated setting, and observation and speaking aloud changed together. Even with those boundaries, the result makes the testing environment hard to ignore (Behroozi et al.).
If my interview format changes how well someone can demonstrate a skill, I need to understand that effect before congratulating myself on spotting a weak engineer. Being comfortable thinking aloud under observation might matter for a particular role. It deserves an explanation of its own. Otherwise, we risk treating stage fright as a missing dependency in someone's technical education.
The audience brings preferences, too. I remember a Reddit post about a hiring decision and a shared interest in soccer, although I haven't located it again. Lauren Rivera's research gives the concern firmer ground. Her 2012 study drew on 120 interviews with people involved in hiring at elite banking, law, and consulting firms, alongside observation at one firm. Shared leisure interests and presentation styles shaped evaluations of cultural fit (Rivera).
In one mock-résumé exercise, a banker responded enthusiastically to a candidate's interest in squash and immediately ranked her first (Rivera 1014). Somewhere between technical qualifications and personal chemistry, the racket had acquired considerable responsibility.
I understand wanting colleagues you enjoy. Work involves other people, often for an unreasonable portion of the week. But someone enjoying my hobbies tells me very little about how they will handle a disagreement with me. A candidate who challenges an assumption thoughtfully might be more valuable than one who makes the interview feel like brunch. When I say someone fits, I should be able to name the work they fit.
This is where the advice to "just be yourself" starts to sound expensive. Which self? The one working through uncertainty, or the one who has rehearsed uncertainty until it arrives with excellent pacing? The one who genuinely needs employment, or the one who can describe the opportunity as the natural culmination of a lifelong interest in your particular category of enterprise software?
For applicants, preparation makes sense. Practicing an explanation can help you recognize what matters. Notes can help you remember your own work. Useful support can make a difficult conversation more manageable. The troubling part is how easily the burden becomes endless self-repackaging. A person can spend the evening revising an account of a real accomplishment until the actual accomplishment feels like supporting material for the account.
My stake in this is obvious. I build a product people tell me helped them communicate. Their messages matter to me, and I am pleased they found it useful. They also make me think harder about what help should accomplish. I want people to convey their brilliance. I want the help to make someone's actual experience easier to explain, including the parts that take a moment to put into words. An applicant should have room to say what they know without having to turn every answer into a trailer for themselves.
Hiring can be designed more carefully. Paul Sackett and colleagues' review of selection research places structured interviews among the strongest predictors of later job performance, while stressing that results vary across settings (Sackett et al.). A conversation organized around the job and evaluated consistently can reveal something valuable. The format deserves the same scrutiny we give the person sitting through it.
For a technical role, I would rather discuss a realistic problem and ask why someone chose a particular approach. Let them inspect relevant material when the work normally permits it. Follow up on a trade-off. Agree beforehand about which tools are allowed. If communication is being assessed, decide what successful communication means for the actual job. A candidate explaining uncertainty accurately should have a chance to score well, even if the uncertainty lacks a stirring conclusion.
For example, ask someone to explain a proposed API change to a teammate. Can the teammate understand who it affects and what might break? Can the candidate answer a follow-up or recognize something they need to check? Those questions give the interviewer something to evaluate beyond whether the explanation sounded impressive. If the real task involves documents and a conversation, a silent pause to consult a document should hardly trigger an investigation into the candidate's passion for engineering.
An interview should help both sides understand whether the person can do the work. Employers deserve confidence in a hire, which means being willing to question where that confidence came from. Feeling immediately comfortable with somebody is pleasant. I would prefer it stayed one piece of information rather than quietly becoming the scoring system.
I will keep listening when users tell me how these conversations went. Their experiences have made the subject harder for me to dismiss, even when the founder in me would enjoy an uncomplicated success story. We can help people communicate and ask why communicating their ability has become such an elaborate production. If the next generation of capable engineers needs an Oscar to reach the payroll, the least we can do is admit that we've been holding auditions.