Please Hold

There is a special kind of limbo that happens in the final stages of interviews. You finish a round, close your laptop, and suddenly the whole world goes quiet, like someone pressed pause on your storyline. One moment you are deep in technical questions, talking architecture, flow, async thinking, then the next you are refreshing your inbox like it owes you money. Engineers joke about slow builds, but nothing compiles slower than HR feedback stuck somewhere between calendars, committees, and mysterious internal processes. The pace becomes weekly, almost episodic, like your entire future is releasing in patches instead of real time. And when you care about the outcome, that pause gets loud.

The Slowest Sprint on Earth

If you have ever waited for the final stages of a tech interview, you already know the feeling. Everything turns into slow motion. Days stretch. Time loses shape. You keep checking your inbox even though you know the email wouldn’t magically appear between two blinks. Your brain becomes a background process stuck on "pending," and somehow the waiting feels harder than the interview itself.

Part of this is emotional. The moment you care about a role, your brain naturally tries to jump ahead. You imagine the team, the work, the conversations. You build tiny mental versions of your future. It feels good, which makes the gap between "I hope this works out" and "still nothing" feel even louder. Neurodivergent brains pick up on that uncertainty like an echo chamber. The silence becomes a signal, even when logically you know it’s just calendars, approvals, and a very slow internal pipeline.

Why It Moves So Slowly

People assume hiring is a quick process because you, the candidate, experience it at full intensity. You prepare, you show up, you pour your energy into each step. So it feels like everything should be equally fast on their side. But engineering interviews run on a different kind of clock.

Behind the scenes, it’s not one person making a call. It’s multiple reviewers, each with their own sprint cycles. Someone is in meetings all day. Someone else is traveling. Someone is trying to close a ticket before release freeze. Suddenly "we will get back to you soon" becomes "let’s sync next Thursday." Not because you did anything wrong, but because companies move at the speed of competing priorities. One hour for them is a whole chapter of overthinking for you.

It also feels slow because engineering interviews are rarely continuous. They are chunked. You get one hour this week, another next week, then a follow-up the week after. Somewhere in the middle, your nervous system forgets how to rest. No dopamine. No certainty. No closure. Just a fresh version of "maybe tomorrow."

The ND Brain In Limbo

Waiting hits neurodivergent folks differently. Our brains are built for momentum, clarity, and immediate context. The moment that context goes quiet, we start generating our own. Stories, theories, fears, hopes. All of it. Even if you know it’s not logical, it still pops up, uninvited, like pop-up ads from old-school browsers.

And because rejection sensitivity is real, silence can feel like a signal. Even when it isn’t. Even when the truth is simply that someone didn’t click "send."

This is why you feel stuck. Your brain is trying to solve a problem with no data. It starts building scenarios. It refreshes. It loops. It over-optimizes. You start wondering if you should have said something differently, or written a different code example, or told a funnier story about that time your build crashed during a demo.

The truth is simpler. Waiting is painful because you want something to move. ND brains are built for motion, not limbo.

Protecting Your Energy While You Wait

The goal is not to pretend waiting is easy. It’s not. This is more about giving your brain a softer place to land while you’re stuck on "loading."

Try switching your focus to tasks that create progress you can actually see. Clean up notes, prep a small project, or build something tiny and pointless for fun. Anything that gives your brain a win instead of a void. Even a 15-minute walk can reset the overthinking loop by shifting your body out of the "alert, waiting, scanning" mode.

It can also help to set specific check-in expectations with yourself. For example: you only refresh email at certain times. You avoid doom-scrolling through the feedback vacuum. You place a mental boundary around it because the interview process should not own your entire week.

Most importantly, remember this: slowness is not a sign of failure. It’s the hiring system’s natural speed bump. You’re still in it. You’re still progressing. Your future hasn’t frozen. It’s just loading.

And sometimes loading bars lie.

If you're in the waiting room right now, consider this your reminder that nothing about this pause decides your future. You're doing the hard part already. You showed up, you did the work, and the rest is just someone else's calendar catching up. Let the world move at its slow pace while you keep moving at yours. Your story didn't stop. It's just buffering.

Simen

Buffer is still loading the feedback screen.