realized i've been prepping for interviews completely backwards

spent weeks grinding leetcode and behavioral frameworks, then bombed when the interviewer asked me to walk through a project on my own resume. the irony hit hard.

i was doing everything the internet told me to do — mock interviews with friends, anki cards for STAR stories, even paid for a leetcode premium sub. felt prepared going into this series B startup interview last month.

then the hiring manager spent 20 minutes asking me about a side project i listed under 'personal projects.' stuff like why i chose that tech stack, what i'd do differently now, how i handled a specific edge case. i froze. it's literally MY project and i couldn't articulate it cleanly because i'd never actually practiced talking about it out loud.

same thing happened with a gap year i took in 2022 — listed it as 'freelance consulting' on my resume but never rehearsed how to explain what that actually meant. stumbled through it.

the whole ride home i kept thinking: i can recite the two-pointer technique perfectly but can't explain my own work history without sounding scattered. we prep for the hardest questions and completely skip the most predictable ones.

ended up finding this tool called nxtinterview that generates questions directly from your resume and lets you record practice answers. used it before my next round and the difference was night and day — i actually sounded like i knew what i'd worked on. not affiliated with them or anything, just sharing what worked for me after that wake-up call.

anyone else realize way too late that resume questions deserve actual prep time?