I spoke to the (internal) recruiter about my accomplishments based on a “career document” that was updated.
I did no special technical preparation for my interview loop (BigTech cloud consulting - app dev). I only practiced behavioral questions based on my career document.
Keeping your resume tidy is more of an expression (making sure you have marketable skills), it doesn't take much effort to update experience and new or shifts in skilling.
As to interviews, I could go on about the current broken interview process, but suffice it to say that interview prepping takes several weeks of sitting through competitive programming problems for most people.
For those who presumably need no sort of prep time, good for you, I however need prep time. I also value my personal time and have no desire sitting around for an hour or more every day playing with competitive programming problems so you'll have fresh memory for interviews that use this silly approach. As such, like many people, I need a little bit of lead time before I can get through all the hurdles. I've yet to see a single employer who doesn't use this process in the past 4 years although maybe I have a bad sample. This includes big tech, mid and small tech and some big/mid that aren't even tech focused I spoke with at different points. I'm glad you managed to find a sane employer that considered prior experience, a resume, and traditional interview process. That is not the norm in my area to say the least.
I really had no interest in the shit show of the modern software engineering interviewing process since I had never had to do a coding interview in my life on the enterprise dev side.
I did know “cloud” by 2020 and had customer facing experience so I was able to pivot to app dev cloud consulting and my BigTech interview was mostly behavioral.
because we have the rest of our lives to live
- update career document
- update resume
- reach out to my network on LinkedIn and schedule a lunch with former coworkers
- sleep well at night.
I’ve been through a layoff, I’ve had to jump ship quickly (a company was acquired by private equity), and I had a sudden 10% paycut (2020). Guess how little I stressed?
Interview ready doesn’t mean “practice grinding leetCode”. It means always be in a position when opportunity knocks (or you need to find a door to knock on), you’re ready.
No. It's about the fact that it's literally the CEO's job to put the business's interests above those of any individual employee. Anything else wouldn't make sense.
If on the other hand you take the perspective of supporting a bottom up independent worker interests above a business's (I fall in this category), then your point is quite valid. Information asymmetry here put me in a terrible situation, if you would have told me earlier, I might have made different decisions. That might not include leaving, but it might have included tidying up my resume and prepping for interviews, just-in-case. Maybe I follow through or maybe I just keep some backups lined up in case things go south. Some may just pass the risk back to the business and jump ship since they assume they have better odds doing this and may even get a promotion.
Personally I don't believe any business leadership's words, I skim financials, I watch movements in the laborforce especially around management, I look at markets and make my own interpretation. I assume they're providing intentional incomplete information to their advantage and try to infer reality from that combined with the other data sources. Businesses are not your friends and will lie to you to their advantage above all else. I'm not a subscriber to Hanlon's razor when it comes to self-interest. What can typically be attributed to self-interest should be considered above incompetence, especially when looking at something as strategic and methodical as a modern business structure that have countless meetings to sit around and discuss and analyze these sorts of things or contract specialized skilled services in these domains.