Good to know you leave references until the end. I will not be able to get a reference if I leave. My company's policy does not allow employees to be a reference for anyone who is leaving.

This isn't uncommon, and as I understand it follows directly from the typical HR policy of only confirming the essentials, such as title, dates of employment and reason for leaving. Companies care more about possible litigation than they do about helping you with your next job.

However, in my experience it's haphazardly enforced. If you're on good terms with a colleague or manager, it's my understanding (IANAL) that they can still provide an informal or personal reference. In practice, for most prospective employers this is just as good as a formal reference (since most companies these days have the aforementioned policy anyways).

My company requires 3 references. Hiring manager does calls those just before offer is made and there is intent. I don't like calling references unnecessarily. There is a form which mostly is about how candidate interacted with co-workers and management and general effectiveness at job. Medical stuff does not come up generally. Personal references do not work well here in general for technical hires unless it's an intern and they worked together on school project or something.

My guess would be that many of the references you call do in fact work for companies with a no-reference policy. This has at least been the case at all of my employers (large and small places alike, some household names), save a 5 person startup.

In my experience, although near-ubiquitous a no-reference policy mostly seems to mean "if anyone calls the company line or shows up on prem, we redirect them to HR who then tells them nothing". It doesn't mean they go out of their way to stop individual employees from giving positive references on their own time (to wit I've never seen any employer actually make any effort whatsoever to disseminate their no-reference policy to employees, it's just a CYA measure they adopt if communication happens through channels they're directly accountable for)

I've only really heard about this policy at some of the larger companies more recently. I didn't know it is becoming a common thing.

I guess it's just another sign of corporate hypocrisy - please provide references when applying, but we will not allow you a reference when leaving.

I appreciate the feedback, thank you. In particular, reminding me to contribute to a larger open source project which is something I haven't done since leaving my last job.

I think a lot of people take open-source to mean "oh, I'll make a project that does something cool in my own time and throw it up on github and everyone can see the code."

And sometimes this works. If you are (to take an extreme example) Linus Torvald and your open source project in Linux, then holy cow, I'm gonna hire you right away. But most people don't have the combination of talent, luck and perseverance that are required to get wide adoption of an open source project. So in 99% of cases, what you are left with is a library or small project that you threw up on a git-hub that maybe has a few stars and that almost no one uses.

Furthermore, as a hiring decision maker, I really don't have much time to actually read your code. Got a project with 3 stars on github? That's great, but I'm really pretty busy writing new features and maintaining my code and I don't have time to read through your code unless I'm pretty certain I'm going to hire you, so I look for proxies. Number of stars is one of them. If 1000 people use your product, it probably says something about the quality of your code or the difficulty of the problem you solved, or at least your ability to solve a problem in a way that people find useful (yes, yes... I know it doesn't guarantee any of these are true, it's just a proxy, but in the initial stage of interviews, proxies are useful).

The issue is that most people are never going to write a project from scratch that gets 1000 stars. However, if you have substantial work in a project that you didn't start, that's also a great proxy. This means that you collaborate with others and not only that, but the people you collaborate with think you are good enough that they are willing to merge in your code. That's a good proxy.

More than that: there are just a handful of open-source projects that went anywhere at all. Among an enormous slushpile of perhaps-worthy but ignored projects.

As a filter for useful, sharable code, open-source is an almost total failure?

If CTCI is your idea of "brushing up on fundamentals," you're doing it wrong.

What kind of approach would you suggest? Genuinely curious :)

What do you want to learn? How to pass interviews, or actual fundamentals? For that matter, fundamentals of what?

Interviews are (with varying degrees of efficacy) meant to gauge fundamentals - so I think you're presenting a bit of a false dichotomy.

That said I haven't really solicited advice on either. My concern is more specifically related to how to frame my past employment and medical issues for a future employer - not so much making it through a technical screening.

I was, and am, curious about what others deem important to their career and craft (e.g. fundamentals), but like I said it's mainly curiosity. If you have something to share I'm all ears, and if not I wish you well.

The context of the original poster's question makes it obvious that they are looking for help interviewing. I'm not disputing the importance of learning "actual fundamentals" and for those, I agree that CTCI isn't the right choice, but it's a very popular book for interviewees for a reason.