Ask HN: Can you share your experience when you bombed an interview badly?
It was 2012 or thereabouts, and I was pounding the pavement in Manhattan to find a new bartending gig. Finding a restaurant job in New York at the time was notoriously difficult. It was highly paid compared to the other options I had available to me as a freshly minted no-name college grad. And yet, the restaurant scene had contracted post-2008. We were still in the economic doldrums of the financial crisis. I swam in a thick school of other highly-credentialed, freshly-minted college grads looking to gain some kind of economic toe-hold in the city to kickstart their adult lives. Lots of anxiety, huge desire to make it, and a lot of &quot;no&quot;s and &quot;we&#x27;ll call you back&quot;s in response to my agonizingly pruned and curated resumes.<p>After a long day of popping my head into each establishment on 7th Avenue, inquiring about work, and being turned away with varying degrees of forced politeness and hostility, I walked into the next one down the line. I asked for the manager. &quot;Hey, I wanted to stop in to see if you are hiring.&quot; I said, one more time.<p>&quot;We&#x27;re always hiring!&quot; He said, with a practiced grin. &quot;Come inside, let&#x27;s chat.&quot;<p>Being a bit green, I couldn&#x27;t believe my luck. Always hiring! He must mean exactly what he&#x27;s saying. What an oasis of opportunity I&#x27;ve found in this desert of &quot;we&#x27;ll-call-you-back&quot;s! And so we sit down, and we start to talk about my work history.<p>I loved bartending, but hated working in restaurants. The job itself was amazing: I got to practice and refine a very cool skill all night, I got to yell at drunk assholes, when it wasn&#x27;t too busy I got to chat with a huge variety of extremely interesting people from all over the world: MTA union reps, underlings of ambassadors and diplomats from the US Civil Service, bus drivers, microbrewery bottle filling techs, and a whole host of drunken weirdos with interesting stories to tell. Especially after a year of sitting indoors, scared of getting breathed on by strangers, I really miss those amazing 2 AM conversations. The sympatico you can feel with another person in an environment like that is a special, sacred thing.<p>And yet, working in a restaurant was anything but nice. The only restaurateurs who could achieve even moderate success in a market like NYC – with its extreme cost of business, dubious morality, and margins thin as Bible paper – were criminals. Just the utility bill at one larger-than-usual Times Square Irish pub I worked at came out to $20,000&#x2F;month, never mind equipment costs, liquor, food, licenses, etc. The incentive to cheat was enormous. A healthy work environment of mutual respect between employer and employee couldn&#x27;t take root in a cut-throat environment absent trust and honor.<p>I either had a healthy sense of self-respect or a chip on my shoulder or something: even though I loved the work, I simply couldn&#x27;t thrive in that kind of environment. I quit a lot of jobs. But still retaining a 24-year-old sense of optimism – a little banged up from stray grocery carts and swinging doors in the parking lot, but mostly chromed out and shining – I was holding out for a place where I could do the work and be respected too.<p>But of course, in a restaurant owner&#x27;s eyes, taking time out to show your employees a little bit of graciousness takes a back seat to more pressing existential questions like &quot;can I keep the lights on in here?&quot; or &quot;how am I going to afford to purchase another shipment of chicken next week?&quot; or &quot;am I going to pay myself a salary this month?&quot; They can&#x27;t afford to worry about this interpersonal stuff, and especially don&#x27;t want to expose themselves to higher turnover if they can avoid it. The bald, goateed gentleman who greeted me at the door, who spent all of 45 seconds picking over my resume with the shrewd eye of an experienced player, absolutely eviscerated me on the spot.<p>&quot;Well, you say you&#x27;ve got four months experience here, but give or take a couple weeks, that&#x27;s really more like three months right? Same goes for that other place, it&#x27;s really more like six huh? So why are you quitting so many jobs son?&quot;<p>I utterly withered. I was already on the mental ropes: I was unemployed with no prospects and a dwindling bank account. My fragile state of mind couldn&#x27;t stand up to this kind of grilling.<p>&quot;Well, uh, I&#x27;m just looking for the right place you know?&quot;<p>&quot;Right. So no place is good enough for you huh? You&#x27;re always finding something wrong with it, right?&quot;<p>What the hell am I gonna respond to a question that? &quot;My first job had a paranoid owner who thought I was stealing cash out of the register, and at the second job it was the general manager himself who WAS actually stealing cash out of the tip jar?&quot; Would he believe me? Or perhaps more to the point, were HIS books even on the level in the first place?<p>&quot;Well ... I&#x27;m just looking for the right place.&quot;<p>&quot;Thanks,&quot; he said, with that look of finality and dismissal that washes over a face when its owner has completely, utterly written you off. &quot;I think I&#x27;ve heard all I need to hear. We&#x27;ll let you know if we want you to work a shift.&quot; We had probably been speaking for all of five minutes, and it was already over. It was rare to sit down to speak with anybody when hunting for a job in the city. I was still riding the high of having snagged an actual interview, and that huge swell of a feeling was crashing hard on the sharp rocks of sudden rejection.<p>It gutted me. Ruined me for days. I had just started my resume pilgrimage for the day, and it was all I could do to drag my shell shocked ass back onto the uptown subway to crawl into bed. All I could manage were bowls of cereal and late-morning binges of the West Wing with my other unemployed roommates for a couple days. And after that, back to the pavement once more, with the looming memory of that interview dogging my every wincing step.<p>I&#x27;d say that was probably my worst interview ever. It&#x27;s funny to look back on it eight years later, many careers and a pandemic removed. I think nowadays the lesson I derive from it is one of scarcity: I had bad tunnel vision wrapped around the idea that restaurant work was the only work for me, and that I had little to no chance of obtaining it. A scarcity mindset is no way to live. There is opportunity out there. Sometimes it&#x27;s hard to find, sometimes you have to work longer than you&#x27;d like to obtain it, but it&#x27;s out there. I&#x27;ll close by recommending this [great podcast on the subject.](<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;2017&#x2F;03&#x2F;20&#x2F;520587241&#x2F;the-scarcity-trap-why-we-keep-digging-when-were-stuck-in-a-hole" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;2017&#x2F;03&#x2F;20&#x2F;520587241&#x2F;the-scarcity-trap-w...</a>)<p>Thanks for the prompt! Fun to recount that part of my life, even though it was hard at the time.