The candidate behind the interview

Leaving your country is never easy. Leaving Cuba adds another level of difficulty.

I won’t go into the reasons why I decided to leave. That could probably become several articles of its own. But there is one practical reality worth understanding: with a Cuban passport, you need a visa for a large part of the world, and when you live on an island, your options for leaving are basically flying or swimming.

Seven years ago, in July 2019, I made the decision that many people from my generation had already made: I needed to leave my country, my family, my roots, and start a new chapter somewhere else.

I explored my options and ended up with three possible destinations: Canada, Europe, or Latin America, mainly Chile or Uruguay.

As a software engineer, I knew there were opportunities outside Cuba. The problem was getting to them.

I needed a company willing to sponsor my visa and, ideally, pay for the trip. When you live in Cuba and earning money in a foreign currency is extremely difficult, even the cost of getting to another country can become an obstacle.

So I searched.

And applied.

A lot.

Eventually, I started my first serious interview process with a German startup for a position in Barcelona. There were some big names behind the company, they were willing to sponsor the visa, and they would pay for my relocation.

For me, it was a dream opportunity.

Then I received the first email from the recruiter.

The interview was scheduled for 4 a.m. Cuba time.

I wasn’t exactly in a position where I felt comfortable asking them to change it. I had an opportunity in front of me, and I was going to make it work.

Then the first problem appeared:

I didn’t have internet at home.

So I rented a hotel room.

It cost around $40, which at the time was a significant amount of money for an average person in Cuba. Hotels were among the few places where you could find a relatively “good” internet connection.

Problem solved.

Except the interview was on Zoom.

And Zoom was blocked in Cuba.

So now I needed a VPN.

Problem number two.

For a video interview, I didn’t want to rely on some unstable free VPN, so I wanted to pay for a decent one.

That created problem number three:

I didn’t have a credit card.

At the time, even the Apple App Store had restrictions in Cuba, so paying for online services was difficult.

Fortunately, there was someone selling Apple gift cards in Cuba at around 20% above their original value.

It wasn’t cheap, but it worked.

I bought the gift card.

Paid for the VPN.

Installed Zoom.

Rented the hotel room.

And at 4 a.m., I was sitting there ready for my first international interview.

Somehow, everything worked.

The connection survived. My basic English was good enough. I passed the recruiter interview and moved to the next stage.

The next step was a technical assignment.

It was a fairly simple frontend project: fetch information from a backend and display cars on a map.

I built what I thought was a pretty decent solution.

Then problem number four appeared.

The instructions required me to deploy the application on Google Cloud Platform.

The deployment itself could be free.

But GCP required a credit card.

No VPN could solve that one.

No Apple gift card either.

So I called one of my best friends in Spain and asked if I could use his card.

He helped me, I deployed the application, and I moved to the next stage: a technical interview where I would discuss my solution with engineers and complete a live coding exercise.

That meant repeating the entire process.

Rent another hotel room.

Pay for the VPN again.

Wake up in the middle of the night.

And this time, sit in the hotel lobby around 2 or 3 a.m., because the internet connection inside the rooms wasn’t reliable enough.

The interview started with the engineers joking about something in my solution.

The cars were appearing in the middle of the ocean.

The backend was returning latitude and longitude values in an unexpected order, and I had missed that when building the map.

Eventually, I figured it out.

I went through the discussion, worked around connection issues, struggled a little with my English, and completed the live coding exercise.

It wasn’t particularly difficult, mostly basic array manipulation in JavaScript.

But by the time I finished that interview, getting there had already required far more than writing JavaScript.

A few weeks later, I received the classic rejection email.

A template.

That was it.

It was hard.

At that moment, it didn’t feel like I had simply failed an interview. It felt like I had lost an opportunity to completely change my life.

Years later, I understood something that most experienced engineers eventually learn: rejection is normal.

You can be qualified.

You can perform well.

You can even be exactly what the job description says they are looking for.

And the company can still reject you.

That’s part of hiring.

But rejection isn’t what I remember most from that process.

Seven years later, what I remember most is how easy it is for interviewers to forget how much an opportunity can mean to the person on the other side.

Looking back, small gestures could have made a significant difference. Something as simple as considering the candidate’s time zone, or being thoughtful about how feedback and jokes are delivered, can completely change how an interview feels.

From the interviewer’s perspective, it might have been just another interview on the calendar.

For me, it was something completely different.

I had rented a hotel room.

Bought an overpriced gift card.

Paid for a VPN.

Borrowed someone else’s credit card.

Spent nights interviewing from a hotel lobby.

And behind all of that was someone trying to find an opportunity to change his life and his family’s life.

Of course, the interviewers didn’t know all of that.

And that is exactly the point.

You rarely know what the person on the other side of the interview is going through.

I still remember the names of some of the people involved. I remember the interviews. I remember the hotel. I remember the cars floating in the ocean.

And I learned something from that process that had very little to do with JavaScript.

On the same day that company rejected me, another company contacted me.

Global66, a Chilean startup, wanted to move forward with my interview process.

A week later, I had an offer.

That was the offer that brought me to Chile.

And I will always be grateful to the people involved in that process.

Looking back, the biggest lesson from my first interview experience wasn’t how to solve technical exercises better.

It wasn’t how to prepare for live coding.

It wasn’t even how to handle rejection.

It was this:

YOU MUST RESPECT THE CANDIDATE.

Since then, I have interviewed many people throughout my career.

Sometimes I was conducting the interview.

Sometimes I was reviewing a technical assignment.

Sometimes I was part of the hiring decision.

And I have always tried to remember that there is a person on the other side.

You don’t know what that person had to do to get to that interview.

You don’t know what is happening in their life.

You don’t know how important that opportunity might be to them.

The least you can do is respect their time and treat them with empathy.

Now, seven years later, and coincidentally during the same period of the year, September, I’m interviewing again.

This time, I’m back on the candidate side.

A lot has changed.

AI is now part of many stages of the hiring process. Recruiting processes are often more distributed, and sometimes the people involved have different levels of domain or technical context. Hiring has also become more automated and standardized in many companies.

Thanks to God, I’m not in the same position I was seven years ago.

Today, I can be much more selective about the companies I talk to and about what I want from the next chapter of my career.

But going through interviews again has reminded me of that first process.

So if you are a candidate looking for a job right now, be patient.

Rejection will happen.

Bad interviews will happen.

Processes that make no sense will happen.

None of those things, by themselves, define your value as an engineer or professional.

And if you are on the other side, recruiting, interviewing, or hiring someone, remember that what might be just another 45-minute meeting for you could mean much more to the person sitting across from you.

Respect the candidate.