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Comment by zero-sharp | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

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?

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