You're Not Interviewing for the Job. You're Auditioning for the Job Title

It's been 10 years since I did an interview and I think I would rather retire and grow rare lizards than jump through the interview hoops at a new company. I am 90% sure I couldn't pass the interview for my current position but I'm the one who designed the whole thing. -staff level backend engineer

In the past 10 years and I was already 40 years old in 2014, I’ve interviewed:

- at a company where they launched a new division in a satellite office in another city to separate the team from the old guard to create a “tiger team” of experienced developers. I was the second hire. I just spoke to the manager as an experienced professional and we talked about how I solved real world problems

- a new to the company director who needed a lead software engineer to integrate systems of acquisitions that the PE owner was buying.

- the new to the company CTO after the founders found product market fit and wanted to bring technology leadership into the company from a third party consulting company. I was eventually tasked with making everything cloud native, scalable, resilient etc. I was his second technical hire. Our customers were large health care companies where one new contract could bring in 10K new users and even more ETL integrations. He knew I didn’t have any practical AWS experience. He later told me I seemed like a smart guy and I could figure it out.

- AWS itself in the ProServe division - 5 round behavioral interview where I walked through my implementations.

- (2024) third party cloud consulting company in a staff role. They asked how would I architect something and I made sure I hit all of the “pillars” of AWS Well Architected and talked through 12 Factor Apps.

I’m 51 and I stay interview ready. My resume and my career documents are updated quarterly and I keep my network warm.

I believe right now if I were looking for a job, someone would hire me quickly if not for a permanent position, at least I could hustle up on a contract.

Do you think you’re a productive and valuable employee with marketable skills?

If the answer was yes, why do you think we’re in a situation where you need to dedicate that much of your own free time, sans compensation, just to make yourself attractive to companies so you can at best fall back on temporary employment?

I do not mean to attack you personally, but your comment is incredibly black pilling and dystopian to me. It’s seems like every year we are going to be asked to do more, get culled if we don’t, and half of the commentary from our community is about how you can avoid the yearly culling by working even harder.

How are employers supposed to know you're productive and valuable if you won't even maintain a decent resume?

Honestly you come off as whiny and entitled, everyone has to present themselves through a CV. If you want to stand out you need to put some work into it.

I work as a consultant/contractor, so I am actively encouraged to polish my resume during work hours. You could look into the same if you also want to be paid to polish your resume. I don't see why other kinds of employers would want you to work on it, the only thing you could use it for would be to leave them.

Maintaining a resume is burying the lede. Being "interview ready" in software means maintaining a separate set of skills that are rarely used in the day to day.

When companies are asking for people to reverse red black trees and then turn around and expect their employees to hook up wordpress sites, or build generic REST based CRUD apps, they are implicitly putting the burden of training on the employees.

I posit that the software field is one of the worst fields when it comes to this