Twice

i’m about like 3 months into hard recruiting for a new entry/mid level sde role after being laid off at rainforest (was there for like 2 years 7 months as a new grad) and rejection hurts so goddamn much i pretty much grind daily doing 3-4 LC problems and 1-2 system design problems as well as occasional mock interviews to make sure i’m well prepared and fortunately i’ve been able to interview with super cool companies like msft, coinbase, meta, snowflake, and a few smaller startups, but just rejected for reasons i will never know until the day i die just today, i get rejected from tiktok and i think im so goddamn close to reaching my tipping point. i clear the two coding rounds and then head into the 3rd round for system design, which i thought went well too. im not going to go over the problem and how i did it but i asked the interviewer not once, but TWICE, to see if there was anything in my design that could be improved on or he would like more details on, and both times he just gave me a confident “no, no it looks good.” so obviously, getting a rejection was not in my bingo card for today. i’m not even sure what the point of this post is as i write this, i just kinda needed somewhere to vent my thoughts. how am i supposed to improve my interviews without knowing what i did wrong? why would the interviewer tell me it looks good just to reject me? i know it’s a tough market nowadays, but fuck dude also, just to clarify, i don’t mean to fear monger how hard software engineer interviews are today, i just wanted to share my personal experience.