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.
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.