Reading this hurts. I’ve been mentoring young people for a while and one increasingly common theme is that some of them don’t want to give up anything to advance their careers. I can barely convince them to update their resumes after I spend time reviewing them and writing feedback. They refuse to practice any coding problems. They are disgusted by the idea of doing any work to prep for interviews.
An increasingly common problem is that I’ll recommend one thing but then they’ll go on Reddit and see 20 comments from people telling them not to do it. Some of them will get job interviews, receive a short take home problem (less than 60 minutes of work. They copy paste them to Slack so I know they’re not excessive) but then they’ll refuse to do it because Reddit told them they should never do any work for a job interview. Then they’re shocked when they’re dismissed from the interview process.
On the other hand, some of the mentees will take any opportunity to get ahead and run with it. They practice LeetCode in moderation. They customize resumes for each job application. They do practice interviews and ask for more feedback. And not surprisingly, it pays off. They get jobs quickly.
I wish I was better at highlighting this difference to people, but the current social media trends are pushing people toward thinking laziness is a virtue, or that working hard on anything is for suckers.