I have been unemployed since March and have done full round interviews at least 8 times, all ending up in failures and tons of wasted hours. It's been terrible and my mental/physical health has been in the gutter the longer I've been without a job plus financially, I am just ripping through my savings which is just more salt on the wound.
The last 2 weeks, I have been interviewing with 2 companies, and I decided that I was sick of messing up the interviews and made the decision to cheat. My reason is I am an experienced dev and have years of experience, but I suck at technical interviews and keep failing to get a job even though I can do the job if they'd just hire me.
How I did it is I didn't do anything crazy, like use an ai bot that listens and spits out the answers or have someone tell me the answers in a little mic. I simply just made cheat sheets in notion that have all the likely questions and answers and put it on my screen where my camera is. I include everything from behavioural questions and my stories to all the random trivia gotcha questions. I have all questions labeled based on subject and just use the table of contents to switch to each category depending on what they ask. If I need more time to find the answer, I just ask another question to clarify.
I did this for the last two interviews, and I just got the offers for both, and I am over the moon that I don't have to stress anymore.
I know it's unethical to cheat but so is this job market and this whole situation in the first place. I lost my original job of 5 years because they offshored my team to cut costs just out of the blue one day.
I guess what I want you all to take from this post is if you're struggling and on the fence about if you should or shouldn't cheat, just do it. If they catch you then it is what it is, but we unfortunately have to make money to eat and keep a roof over our heads so just do whatever you have to do to land a role.
For me it ended up getting me these offers which I wouldn't have gotten if I hadn't cheated.
Edit: I got a lot of chat requests so I can message you guys back tomorrow, BTW my notes arent anything special, and I just created them with claude and had claude format them for notion. They are also based on topics my recruiter gave me so my notes might not be helpful for your particular interview. I make different notes for every interview
Update 2: hey guys, I have received a lot of messages and have tried to answer many of you, but I will not be answering anymore at this time. I am also not sharing my cheat sheets, they are tailored per job and for my specific stack and yoe. They were created using Claude which you can do as well just as easily as I did. For my own time, I will be ignoring all further chat requests in regards to this post.