Ah yes, I just posted a comment that kind of went into that:

https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/z715eo/a_job_interview_ended_because_i_refused_to_tell/iy54noe/

I need to do a better job of learning how to take this advice from Reddit.

Thanks for the response, it was a good learning experience, and I'll try to be better next time. I do think that I'm missing some of those critical life skills. I come from a very blue collar family, my parents didn't even graduate high school. So I'm hyper aware at those invisible skills that I'm missing.

I feel like I've had a disappointing first decade of working life due to listening to the conventional wisdom of my family and guidance counselors that turned out to be straight incorrect or misleading, or not applicable to life in the 2010s and 2020s.

The people on this sub, /r/financialindepenendence and its variants, subs about engineering or MBAs and so on, seem to be much more confident with their intuitive "map" of which industries provide salary growth and are/will be in demand. Which technical/resume skills will get you there. How to develop the "soft" skills that will keep you there. How to shift your resources to financial instruments that will build wealth. What to do with the question of housing and planning your lifestyle to give yourself the life you want. More so than anyone I've ever spoken to in real life. So I will confess to trying to compensate by following the advice I see here to a large degree.

I'm just thinking out loud, but I guess I have to mentally shift from "I'm taking the general uncontroversial advice" mode - Learn to code, get a stable job, follow the flow chart - these are all things that I had to learn from Reddit. Now I'm moving to the mode where applying advice to my life specifically takes some discretion and I need to allow room for improvisation.

I've learned to ignore the gut feelings I get. Because so far, Reddit's advice has mostly been more correct than the ones I picked up. So when the HR person was pushing me, of course I instinctively wanted to just answer and move it along. But I just kept thinking "No, I've seen comments where people literally say to continue answering robotically and they get 75 upvotes, and they talk about how if you give the first number, you're screwed. My urge to be nice to HR must just be my poverty background talking. The same thing that told me not to ask for a raise, or not to hop jobs for a raise, or not to ask for more responsibility".

Personal problem, I take full responsibility, and I'll try to do better next time.