Sat on the other side of the table as an interviewer for the first time and it recalibrated everything

Our team's hiring and my lead threw me into two loops last week as the second interviewer. I've been on the candidate side maybe thirty times in the last two years, so I figured I knew what was happening in those rooms.

I didn't.

The thing that got me: after the first candidate left, we spent maybe four minutes on them total. Four minutes. I have spent entire weekends replaying a single answer I gave. Meanwhile the actual conversation was "strong on the debugging part, we never really got to see how he'd handle ambiguity, let's move him forward." That was it. Nobody mentioned that he stumbled through the first ten minutes, which is exactly the part he probably went home and agonized over.

I also didn't expect how much I'd be rooting for people. Every awkward silence felt worse for me than it looked on them.

Not saying rejections stop stinging. Just that the room I'd built in my head, a panel hunting for reasons to say no, was not the room I was actually sitting in.