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I can relate, because I have had situation where I blew every question and at the end of interview I felt that people were annoyed by me, or my lack of knowledge.

The thing was at that moment I just left shitty job, with 24h phone support for our systems switching with other person on weekly shifts, also I was quite under attack by one of better established guys. I had savings so no problem there. But still I had to find job in something like 3 months before going back to my town.

My self esteem was on the bottom. They got 4 people to question me and senior guy was math phd. After second question it went downhill. Logarithms were not my strong side and then SQL stuff that I was doing day in and out just 'PUFF' went away. (now I am senior, leading team of 5, delivering loads of value, but back then I would not believe I could do that)

I believe that environment and surroundings contribute a lot to what you thing about yourself. I picked wrong fight in wrong time. That guy probably also should work on his basics, or maybe it is just sob story.

This is the thing that really scares me about burnout. You get so mentally exhausted, that you are unable to think straight enough to pass an interview even if you would have enough skills to blow them away after a couple months of rest.

I was in a similar situation, basically not recognizing the signs of burnout until layoff time, and it took me 4 months to be able to properly interview (fortunately, the economy was down so it also took 4 months to be able to schedule any proper interviews anyway).

Similar story here. I'm a TL at a Big N company right now with a team of ~8, but I failed pretty badly interviewing at a unicorn a bunch of years ago. Don't know if I was having an off day or wasn't prepared properly or what, but I just flubbed it. Shit happens. Interviewing is very high variance. Where I currently work, there's a small proportion of interviewees who are good enough to always get hired, and then a much larger number who are good enough to sometimes get hired, depending on factors outside their control. Hence why people can re-interview a year later so long as it didn't go terribly the first time.

> Oh, and now they decide they don't like you even though you've gotten to the stage where they flew you across the country??

Why is that surprising? E.g. Google flew me on my interview as a student kid with pretty much barely any screening (and yeah, as a student I also didn't have nearly enough money to buy a ticket home from Zurich airport on the spot at that time - with 150EUR of scholarship income, it's hard to have a few K EUR at hand on your credit card).

Skepticism is warranted here (it's entirely possible that the post is fake), but this isn't an impossible situation if I think of all the petty vindictive garbage humans I've met that led companies.

Why is that hard to believe? When I first started my tech career I was in a similar boat trying to go to interviews with no money in my pocket.

> Laying everything on this thick just doesn't increase credibility for me. It makes me suspicious.

Counterpoint: if you've gone through enough hardship, your self-esteem can tank so much that you start thinking in black-and-white -- "I blew every single question" etc.

Every once in a while someone's gonna go through something really bad: "perfect storms of woe-is-me" do come by, and our selection bias of upvoting those specifically means that we're disproportionately more likely to see really horrifying stories.

I honestly don't believe it either. It's the perfect mix of "this is terrible and totally happened to me" and "I'm afraid to say who". If this happened to me I would absolutely start my first sentence with "I went for an interview at..."

Maybe, but there are plenty of people in terrible financial situations that would be seeking for anyway out of it. Maxed credit cards and nothing to fall back on, etc..

Considering there are at least a million people in this situation any one of them could have accepted a remote interview.

A variant of the "Nigerian Price" (https://www.bbb.org/new-york-city/get-consumer-help/articles...)?

>That fourth paragraph is an over the top perfect storm of woe-is-me.

I've had my credit card declined when I tried to buy gas 2 hours away, late at night, because they assumed it was fraud. For 2 years and change, paying a hospital bill every month, my debit card issuer would flag it as fraud every single time, I'd have to contact them and say it wasn't, then attempt to pay again. Every single time.

It's wholly plausible, even without the card balance being near or at the limit, that they are having their card declined.

It's quite realistic that they have no one they can call and ask to have money wired to them, to buy their ticket, etc.

It's quite realistic that they are sleep deprived if they've been in an airport for even a day with no means of leaving which can severely impact mood and mental status, add this with the defeat of not only not getting the job but having their return flight cancelled as well as possibly being unemployed with no savings at all, it can be incredibly easy to go full-Eeyore.

Ticket price out of a smaller airport likely means one or more connections, last minute flight also often means considerably pricier.

I had a company interview me last year 3 times via video for an entry level customer service type position including a half hour with one of the co-founders as the 2nd interview, he wanted me to talk to a different department about an even higher job so I did for the 3rd interview, he started the call "I'm not sure why we are talking, why did co-founder have us schedule a meeting" and after talking to me for 45 minutes "well I don't have any positions right now, I wish you the best of luck". This is 12 days from the first interview, for the position I applied to, so I pinged the co-founder stating 3rd person said he didn't know why he was talking to me as he didn't have any positions an was busy training his most recent hires, and mentioned it had been 12 days since the first person interviewed me and I'd not heard anything on that front and if he could update me since the interviewer never gave me their email address. Within a few minutes "Caught up with first person, they mentioned you're likely not a good fit for us on THATPOSITION side either. Definitely encourage you to keep honing your skills. Maybe find a relevant side project or a local company..." so I fully buy that a company would show that level of interest and then "sorry bout ya, by!"

Here in the midwest if you get 3 interviews, one of which with the CEO that also tells you the starting salary, you've got the job not "yeah bye Felicia". I was in a funk for 3 days and I was comfortable in my bedroom, not stuck in a random airport.

> Laying everything on this thick just doesn't increase credibility for me. It makes me suspicious.

No doubt. But then again I see no company name mentioned, or even hinting at it. Also:

> But this portion has nothing to do with the point of the post; given the outrageous nature of the post in the first place, this smells to me like a sob element to hook more people in.

Not so sure here. Not that I ever had to eat other people's leftovers, but assuming this story is true I could absolutely see that you want to release steam and just process what happened, maybe because you can't really believe it yourself yet.

> But then again I see no company name mentioned, or even hinting at it

It doesn't have to be an attack on a specific company; I think it's just posted for laughs: "Can you believe they're responding seriously to this?"