realized i've been prepping for interviews completely backwards

spent weeks grinding leetcode and studying system design, then bombed an interview because i couldn't cleanly explain a project that's literally on my resume.

happened last month during an onsite for a backend role. sailed through the coding round, felt decent about architecture discussion. then the hiring manager asked me to walk through my internship project from two years ago — something i listed under 'key projects' — and i just... fumbled. couldn't remember the specific tech stack choices, why we went with postgres over mongo, what my actual contributions were vs the team's. it's right there on the paper i sent them, but i hadn't looked at it in months.

the weirdest part? i'd spent 40+ hours on leetcode and maybe 15 minutes total thinking about how to talk about my own work. we all do this. we prep for the hardest questions — the algorithm brain teasers, the obscure API trivia — and skip the most predictable part of every interview: explaining what's already on our resume.

after that disaster i started actually rehearsing answers about each bullet point. what i built, why those choices, what i'd do differently. took maybe two hours total. next interview i had that same type of question and it felt like i was reading from a script i'd written.

i also tried this thing called nxtinterview that generates practice questions based on your actual resume, which was helpful for catching gaps i hadn't thought about. not affiliated with them, just found it easier than sitting there trying to guess what an interviewer might ask about my aws migration story or whatever.

anyway if you're prepping, maybe spend 20% of your time on the stuff you 100% know they'll ask about. that's the low-hanging fruit everyone ignores.