The hardest part of a hiring process at senior level is not the interviews. It is the silence between submitting your last piece of work and hearing back.
I am writing this in the middle of one. I sent a written take-home challenge to a company I want to work for. Confirmation came two days later: review takes about two weeks. That has been roughly the longest two weeks I have had this year.
Why this part is harder than it looks
The interview part is structured. There is a prompt, a clock, and a person on the other side. You can prepare. You can read the room. You leave knowing whether you stumbled or did the work.
The wait does none of that. The work is already submitted. There is nothing left to do that affects the outcome. Refreshing email does not move the timeline.
What makes it heavier at senior level is that the work was judgment-shaped. It is not a coding test with a right answer. It is a writeup, a debug, a piece of operational reasoning. You have shown how you think and let it go. There is no hiding behind “the question was bad” if it does not land.
The wrong things I do
These are the temptations I have actually given in to during this wait:
- Re-reading what I sent, looking for a sentence I would now phrase differently.
- Imagining the reviewer’s tone.
- Drafting, in my head, the follow-up email I would send to ask for an update too early.
- Reading the company’s blog at midnight as a way of feeling productive about waiting.
- Translating the wait into a story where I have already lost, just to numb the suspense.
None of these change the outcome. All of them change my mood for the next hour.
The rule that actually holds
The first rule I tried was check email once a day. It failed within three days. Email is a habit, not an event.
The rule that has held is harder, and worth saying clearly:
The work I submitted is the case I made. Re-reading it does not improve it. Worry does not strengthen it.
That is not a feeling. It is a statement of fact. Whether the answer is yes or no, the version of me that gets to live with it is the version of me who kept working on other things during the wait.
What helps, in concrete terms
- Have parallel work that genuinely matters. Not busy-work — work whose outcome you would care about even if this offer never existed.
- Pick a finite check window for the email and put it in the calendar. Outside that window the inbox stays closed.
- Do not narrate the wait to other people more than once. Each retelling deepens the rut.
- Let the body do something. Long walks, the gym, a sport that demands attention. Tired bodies spin less.
- Keep a short list of what you would do tomorrow whether the answer is yes or no. Tomorrow is going to happen either way.
The thing I am trying to learn
Outcome and self-worth are connected by less than they feel during a wait.
If the answer is no, the work I submitted was still the best version of my reasoning at the time. If the answer is yes, my judgment did not become better in the moment the email arrived — it was already there.
The wait is the part of hiring that tests whether I actually believe that.