“Keeping those skills sharp even when you’re not job hunting.”

It’s so tiring to continue to see this.

If the “skills” you need to keep sharp are not the same thing as the skills you exercise through your job, that’s a giant red flag that the hiring company should be avoided.

If you’re practicing leetcode or Kaggle in your spare time to pass interviews, you need to stop and realize you’ve set up your goals completely backward and you are actively helping companies to commoditize your labor product and short change you on poor job quality or experience building.

If you don’t reject companies when they try the algorithm hazing crap that has no bearing on the real day to day job of software engineering, you are setting yourself up to fail and burn out, with crappy resume experience and nothing but perpetual leetcode skill to show for it.