Why resume writing is snake oil

By Aline Lerner | Published: April 1, 2025; Last updated: November 12, 2025

A lot of other platforms offer resume reviews or help with writing resumes for $$. We don't do it, despite a lot of our users asking for this feature. The reason I've refused to build them is because, simply put, resume writing is snake oil. Why? Because recruiters aren't reading resumes. If you don't have top brands, better wording won't help. If you do have top brands, the wording doesn't matter.

It's OK to postpone your interviews if you're not ready

By Aline Lerner | Published: March 24, 2025; Last updated: April 27, 2025

At interviewing.io, we’ve seen hundreds of thousands of engineers go through job searches, and the biggest mistakes we see people make are all variations on the same theme: not postponing their interview when they aren’t ready. In most situations, there is no downside to postponing. In this post, we'll tell you what to do and say.

Read nine chapters of Beyond Cracking the Coding Interview for free

By Aline Lerner | Published: March 1, 2025; Last updated: April 27, 2025

Nine free chapters of Beyond Cracking the Coding Interview. are now available for free.

You can find them here.

They include:

• The first seven chapters of the book, covering topics such as why technical interviews are broken, what recruiters won't tell you, why not to spend a lot of time on resumes, and how to get in the door at companies without a referral.
• Two technical chapters: Sliding Windows and Binary Search. Our new take on Binary Search teaches one template that works for every binary search problem on LeetCode, with only a single-line change you need to remember. The Sliding Windows chapter features 6 unique sliding window templates that make off-by-one errors a thing of the past.

We co-wrote the official sequel to Cracking the Coding Interview!

By Aline Lerner | Published: January 26, 2025; Last updated: April 27, 2025

Gayle Laakmann McDowell, Mike Mroczka, and Nil Mamano, and I have written the official sequel to Cracking the Coding Interview (often called the bible of technical interview prep). The sequel is fittingly called Beyond Cracking the Coding Interview.

We cover everything you need to know for today's tougher technical interviews and hiring climate. We have (at least) thirteen new technical topics and over 150 new problems. We’ve also drawn on a decade of hiring data and 100k interviews from interviewing.io to help you get noticed, manage your job search, and negotiate the best possible offer.

The book is available now, and purchases come with $50 off on interviewing.io... given that it costs ~$45, it's not a bad deal.

I love meritocracy, but all the recent anti-DEI rhetoric is bad

By Aline Lerner | Published: October 2, 2024; Last updated: November 12, 2025

I’m the founder of interviewing.io, and in some ways, I’m the meritocracy hipster who was writing about how eng hiring should be meritocratic and about how quotas are bad, way before saying either was cool. At interviewing.io, my team and I have been trying to make hiring meritocratic for the last decade.

I’ll also be the first to admit that DEI is ideologically flawed because of its emphasis on race and gender-based outcomes and its insistence on equality of those outcomes. In the last decade, we've seen a lot of bad stuff done in the name of DEI, firsthand. I'll talk about those in this post.

But all the recent pro-meritocracy, anti-DEI rhetoric is bad. Yelling “Meritocracy!” as if it’s a fait accompli is just as harmful as the worst parts of DEI. I’d even go so far to say that the DEI movement has done more for meritocracy than the loud pro-meritocracy movement is doing right now.

I’m delighted that “meritocracy” is no longer a dirty word. But, just saying it isn’t enough. We have to change our hiring practices. We need to stop using meritocracy as a shield to preserve the status quo.

In this post, I talk about the flaws of DEI, the false promise of meritocracy, and what to do to actually make hiring meritocratic and fair.

How well do LeetCode ratings predict interview performance? Here's the data.

By Mike Mroczka | Published: September 11, 2024; Last updated: September 15, 2025

Have you ever wondered if you should spend more time on LeetCode, participate in those contests, or focus on solving harder problems? A popular Reddit post suggests you need 700+ questions and a LeetCode rating between 1800-2000 to pass FAANG interviews. Is this really what the data supports? To answer these questions and more, we looked at our users' LeetCode ranks and ratings and tied them back to interview performance on our platform and whether those users worked at FAANG.

In this post, we’ll share what we’ve learned.

How to get in the door at top companies: Cold outreach to hiring managers. Part 2 of 2.

By Aline Lerner | Published: July 30, 2024; Last updated: March 23, 2026

In part 1 of this post, we analyzed different ways to get into companies along two axes: effectiveness and how much control you actually have.

The channel that maximizes both effectiveness and control is cold outreach to hiring managers (not recruiters!). And yet, most people do this type of outreach incorrectly. In this post, we'll tell you exactly what to do and what to say to reach out to hiring managers at top companies and get responses.

How to get in the door at top companies: a data-driven, practical guide for software engineers. Part 1.

By Aline Lerner | Published: July 23, 2024; Last updated: October 28, 2024

interviewing.io is an anonymous mock interview platform — we help engineers prepare for technical interviews. In this market, many of our users are struggling with getting in the door at companies, so we ran a survey to see what’s worked well and what hasn’t, in today’s difficult climate.

Not surprisingly, warm referrals are the best way in. On the other hand, agency recruiters are clearly the worst. But not all channels are created equal. Some, like recruiters contacting you, you have minimal control over, and whether you get contacted is largely a function of whether you have top brands on your resume or belong to an underrepresented group. With others, like reaching out to hiring managers, you are fully in control of your destiny. Here's how to make the most of a difficult landscape.

Why engineers don’t like takehome assignments – and how companies can fix them

By Aline Lerner | Published: July 16, 2024; Last updated: December 18, 2025

We surveyed almost 700 of our users about their experiences with take-homes and interviewed a handful more for deeper insights. We learned a lot—mostly about candidates' poor experiences and negative feelings toward take-homes. They take a lot of time. They don’t respect candidates’ time. Candidates often get no feedback. And candidates are almost never compensated. Really, it's all about value asymmetry.

The good news? Turns out there are some pretty simple things companies can do to vastly improve their take-home assignments.

The other half, or why interviewers aren't always great and how to make them better

By Jos Visser | Published: June 10, 2024

It is high time we start talking about interviewing. I know it seems like we are talking about interviewing all the time, but we are usually talking about only one half of the equation: How to be a good candidate. What about the other half? What about the interviewer?

In the last decade, there has been an explosion of attention for candidates and how to improve their interview performance. This stands in stark contrast to the preparation of the interviewer. If you are lucky, your interviewer might have gotten a two hour class on how to ask only bona fide work related questions and has sat through two shadow interviews. Maybe they have even done a few interviews! Consequently, there is a lot of bad interviewing being done. That needs to change.

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