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Comment by throwawaysleep | Hacker News Reader

This is why I just interview endlessly. At least one a week. You need to develop a callus to interviewing.

Find the time for it by rubber stamping a few code reviews.

It gets boring after a while. Just a very repetitive process after 100 or so.

I do similar, though only a few times per year. I also advise all my colleagues (and sometimes managers!) to do likewise. My rationale:

1. Interviewing is a career skill that has an outsized influence on your earning potential. You need to practice it to get good and keep those skills sharp.

2. Interviewing regularly (minimum twice per year, YMMV) keeps you up to speed on what skills are in demand and what problems companies are trying to solve.

3. It's a great way to network. I'm up-front about being a passive candidate and I still get takers for interviews. Even if you don't take the job after passing an interview, you'll have a foot in the door if you revisit your interviewee in the near future or have somebody you can send their way.

4. You never know when you'll need to change jobs. Job satisfaction, change in life circumstances, layoffs/economic downturns, or any number of things completely outside of your control can force a change in your employment.

It doesn't matter if you're happy, busy, or hate interviewing--interview regularly or suffer the consequences for being unpracticed and unprepared.

One interview a week? Are you serious? You must move job every few months then? Do you not get new job fatigue? The first few months at a company are horrible - getting the lay of the land, understanding who you have to impress and who you don’t…etc

Realizing my competition is doing this was even more discouraging for me. Energy can just be put towards other things.

Do you do the full loop with each company? How do you select the companies? Do you feel bad if they’re smaller ones and you’re not serious about it?

Not OP, but why would you feel bad? Anecdotally, I’ve gone into interviews before thinking it means nothing, and one of the small companies I wasn’t serious about ended up convincing me to join. It’s really on the company to sell their vision.

Yes. I usually target hybrid roles in a place I am unwilling to live like New York as many are explicitly for practice. And I generally do not interview for smaller companies as the process is usually wacky. I was once asked to argue for forcing a company on Linux, Mac, or Windows for a dev role.

What if you actually pass an interview which you weren’t really interested in to begin with? Decline with some BS excuse?

The amount of deception you’ll have to do is what holds me back from constant “practice” interviewing

“The compensation is not adequate enough to make me want to leave.”

And if the compensation is so high you want to leave, just leave.

And if they know that not to be the case, the offer is probably good enough to leave for anyway. So in my practicing, I found a new job.

Tell them you got another internal role at your company. It's reasonable and totally unverifiable.

I frequently do. I get at least one offer a month.

You don’t need a BS excuse. You can just say you took a higher offer/offer with more vacation.

A lot of these companies aren’t paying competitively anyway, so they are used to people declining.

I just now am understanding this. I usually do a leetcode per week. But now I'm straight up booking interviews. They created the game, I'm just playing it.

Once you interview and turn them down then will they interview you again? Doesn't that close a lot of doors?

> Once you interview and turn them down then will they interview you again? Doesn't that close a lot of doors?

Currently, at least, big tech cos will keep that door open. Think of it this way - a company spending $$$ on recruiters cold-emailing a bunch of candidates, the majority of whom fail the process, isn't gonna throw away leads of people who they know have passed the process at least once.

My solution to this is to book many of my interviews in places where I am unwilling to live, like New York. So whether or not I am burning bridges, it does not matter because I would not accept many of those roles anyway.

100+? Are you just interviewing at anywhere and everywhere?

Yes. I target hybrid roles in places I have no interest in living. Use an burner number app to pretend I live nearby, and away I go.

This sounds like something that should have its own entry in the DSM V.

"I took a test to see if I was a sociopath, I scored 1 point under the threshold, but I think I got that point back when I broke in to the testing site to see my result early"

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