Can You Bubble Sort

The classic bait-and-switch of tech recruiting. You walk in ready for a chill junior dev interview where they'll ask about your bootcamp projects and whether you know what a for-loop is. Instead, they hit you with LeetCode Hard problems, system design questions about distributed caching, and want you to implement a red-black tree on a whiteboard while explaining Big O notation in Mandarin.

Then after you somehow survive the gauntlet meant for someone with 10 YoE, they offer you an intern salary with "great learning opportunities" and exposure as compensation. The tears are real because you know you'll still take it because rent is due and your student loans aren't going to defer themselves.

Pro tip: When they ask "where do you see yourself in 5 years?" the correct answer is "at a company that matches job requirements to actual compensation."