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I’ve found this advice to be far too prevalent and largely unrealistic. Nearly everything about the interview process is out of your control. Getting multiple, competing offers to line up is extremely hard.

It’s basically like saying “you win a race by being the fastest”. No duh! How you be the fastest is the hardest part.

Yeah it is so difficult to align these. I had two interview loops going and the other company was my clear favorite but the loop took like 2 months while the other was two weeks. So what I ended up doing is that I took the first job and now in a month or so I am going to quit and move to the other. It sucks but I literally had no other way because I cannot predict the result of the other interview and I cannot ask the other to wait freaking two months

It's uncomfortable, but possible. In other domains, you might not be able switch from one choice to the other at all.

I find that thought calming.

Wow, that doesn't seem right.

Is it really? Maybe it depends on your market, but I've been able to do it... pretty much every time over the last 12 years. You apply to a bunch of places over ~2 weeks, then try to get the slow ones to speed up and/or the fast ones to slow down. If you've got an offer and are waiting to hear back from a few other companies, you can usually just say that and the first offer will wait a week or two.

Would you work 80 hour weeks for a month or two to make an additional $5-20k per month indefinitely for the foreseeable future?

I would. It's not like it's impossible, it's just more work.

This feels like a "mythical man month" fallacy.

Say you're working a standard 9-to-5. Sure, you can submit applications during the evenings, but once you get your foot in the door, you're constrained by the business hours of the place where you're applying.

Most job interviews take place during normal business hours. You might be able to take your lunch hour to do a phone screen, or you might be able to take off a couple of days of PTO for an on-site interview.

But you can't work your normal 9-5 and then expect to do all your job interviews from 5-midnight.

You're right, but I imagine there is wiggle room - both in scheduling interviews from 5PM to 7-8PM, as well as trading day job business hours needed for interviews for "working late" (really making up the time) for stuff that isn't meetings or synchronous.

If you're hustling toward a $300-600k/yr gig, I think a lot of temporary insanity can be tolerated in furtherance of that goal. Remember also that salary increases compound over your working career.

Works well in theory but not in practice. Your peers/managers will soon notice and figure something’s up especially if each of the interviews has 5-6 rounds(which is what you’d usually expect for a position paying $300k-$600k)

> Remember also that salary increases compound over your working career.

Not true. As demostrated by 2021-2 outrageous offers where the market is now correcting itself.

> Not true. As demostrated by 2021-2 outrageous offers where the market is now correcting itself.

Are many people taking salary cuts? Layoffs?

Enough so to bring them back to where they started?

While you have no children, maybe

I did it (3 FAANGs). I also did it once before with my then-current employer and two other companies.

You have to stall the urgent folks and push the slow ones.

It did take a lot of burning vacation time.

Even when you're doing nothing but applying and have a decently impressive combination of skills and experience, it can be quite difficult in certain environments to get a single offer, let alone multiple offers, let alone multiple offers coming in at the same time.

It's even worse if you lack any impressive skills and experience.

Aside from the fact that interviewing itself is really bad for my mental health, despite being in the bottom of the percentiles on places like levels.fyi, I doubt I'd be able to match my currently salary with any job that I could actually get hired for. So, looking up this type of information just ends up discouraging me even more.

Knowing that finding a job is less about salary and more about just being able to get an offer makes most of this advice less than helpful.