Realized halfway through the interview they were quizzing me on a framework I haven't used since a bootcamp project
Recruiter screen never mentioned specifics, just said backend engineer, general problem solving. Twenty minutes into the technical round the interviewer starts asking really pointed questions about Kafka consumer groups and I'm sitting there realizing this whole thing is scoped around a stack I used for one project two years ago and haven't touched since. I said so, flat out, told them I could talk through the concepts but I wasn't going to pretend I use it daily. They actually seemed to appreciate that more than if I'd faked confidence, pivoted the rest of the round to general distributed systems questions instead. Still don't know if I'll get an offer but I stopped sweating what I don't know at least.
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AnonymousAnon Did you flag it back to the recruiter afterward? Curious if that changes how they screen calls going forward or if it's just a one-off miss on their end.
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AnonymousAnon Had almost the same moment with a team that assumed I knew Terraform cold because it was on the JD, buried in a bullet list I skimmed past. Owning it out loud saved the round for me too.