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Comment by rr808 | Hacker News Reader

The other point specifically for devs is how interviewing is such a different skill to normal work. The people with the best careers are almost always interviewing. If you constantly using that muscle you get really good. The guy I know who stayed in the same role for 15 years and got laid off is screwed because he's a great developer but doesn't know any of that stuff.

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Yea, but who wants to be always interviewing? That sounds terrible.

At some point your life is going to have different priorities.

Always can mean every 2 or so months.

To be honest, the dynamics change completely when you are not in-need of work. What is a matter of ensuring one's livelihood quickly transforms to a friendly conversation with potential colleagues. The stress of finding a job is replaced by novelty and curiosity, by opportunity for something new.

"Proactive Serendipity" [1] is a great way to live by in my opinion. In essence, you should put yourself in the position to get lucky. Not interviewing or at least not being open to interviewing is an easy way to close doors that you may not know existed.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsFk8SKYSDg

One hack I've seen is to be the interviewer, not the interviewee

How is that a hack? I guess if you're moving between roles with similar/identical skill sets, great. But I've always had to spend time preparing. Being selective as an applicant doesn't mean you don't have to prepare.

I’ve used “preparation” as an excuse to go research and expand my knowledge.

I’m not and will never cram down algorithms for an interview. So far that strategy has worked for me /shrug.

I've interviewed many people, probably well over 100. One of the side effects is that I am very comfortable being interviewed and I'm usually completely relaxed because I know where the other person is coming from and what they're looking for.

It also helps that I haven't interviewed for a position where my programming skill was in question in a very long time.

Of course I understand prime number trees...

Look, I'm the interviewer, quit turning the tables!

Love the joke, but what is a prime number tree?

"what is a prime number tree?"

"send in the next applicant!"

Applicant? I don't recall applying for anything.

How did I get here?

Always interview, be overemployed as a C player at the jobs you get, retire early.

We had a guy do that. He got fired from all his jobs and effectively blacklisted in the area.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40363135#40363405

Was this like in the outskirts of Saskatchewan? :) I can't think of a way to meaningfully blacklist engineers in the age of remote work.

I said the area, but no, in CO. He was employed by a couple space-related companies, which is still a small field. In one job he was also hired via a national hiring agency, so he screwed himself out of any jobs through them again. The genius was not smart enough to get remote jobs. He may have had more success with remote jobs, but in the layoffs over the last couple years I doubt he would have survived, he was definitely not contributing enough to keep around.

It's easy to get a bad rep in niche industries in a small area because we tend to know each other. I had a guy who was our worst hire ever list me as a reference. Unfortunately, the hiring manager at the next job he tried to get was a friend and former co-worker of mine.

What does C player mean here?

Scraping by. Doing barely enough to not get fired.

“People with the best careers are almost always interviewing” might just be the craziest sentence ever written on this website…

Isn’t there a very real cap of say 200-225k for senior level regardless of where you go tho?

After that would be faang which itself is the endgame except (in some cases) jumping between faangs could get you more

At FAANG and adjacent that’s closer to the bottom of the career ladder. A Sr. at FAANG is pulling in closer to 350-400 TC. Staff, PE, and above will go significantly higher.

Well yeah that’s what I said… my main point was that unless you job hop into a faang, you’re quickly at the ceiling

And once you’re in a faang, there’s no higher to go

Also you learn more stuff by working at different companies. Every place does things differently. Good to cross pollinate.

Arguably many of the people with the best careers worked at one company—-their own.

Does talking with the voices in my head count as interviewing?

Eh. I really don’t think it takes that much to get into the swing of interviews. Developers sometimes suffer with them because our jobs make it easy to be introverted and avoid personal contact. As long as you’re regularly using your social “muscle” at work (which is always always a good career move no matter what) applying that same energy to an interview isn’t such a huge lift.

The problem is that it is a competition. If socializing is difficult for you, you can still get better at it with plenty of practice, but you are up against other applicants who had the same amount of practice as you and got more out of that practice (because they are naturally better at it).

Telling everyone across the board to just practice more does not actually solve the problem. The problem is solved only by having more job openings relative to applicants OR by teaching interviewers how to do their jobs better (i.e., how to identify skills that the role calls for, rather than inadvertently using social skill as a proxy for those other skills).

Role skills mean that the interviewer checks a box. Social skills mean that the interviewer thinks he'll like working with you.

Which one do you think has more impact?

What percentage of interviewers actually work alongside the employees they hire?

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