HACKER Q&A
📣 lebensmittel

Quit my job to focus on interview preparation


Hello,

I'm a software developer with 10-15 years of experience under my belt, but I spent most of them not working on technical problems challenging enough to justify the 10-15 years and only last 3-4 years I moved to backend. I sure as hell delivered quality software that paid the bills and then some.

Needless to say that I'm quite rusty and/or unexperienced in most of the typical interviewing questions and I need to get up to speed but I work full time and I have no energy after 40 hours work week.

I want to move land a job in FAANG type of company in the US and I know leetcode type interviews is very common there. My idea is to quit my current job so I can dedicate my time to studying for interviews. I can afford this since I will rely on unemployment money in my home country. Do you think this would be a waste of time? did anyone do such a thing? what are your thoughts fellow HNers?

Thanks in advance!

  👤 ericalexander0 Accepted Answer ✓
Hate the game. The reality is: Yes, polished/prepped interviewers will do better on common interview puzzles. Speaking as an interviewer.

How did we get here? Competition and survivor bias. Bar raising at the FAANGs lead to irrelevant algorithm and data structure puzzles in the interview. Now it's common place industry wide. Now it's gamified with leetcode and cracking the coding interview.

Cracking the coding interview has a interesting blurb about how common this exact tactic is in an acquihire deal. It's not uncommon for all "real work" to stop so engineering can prep for interview s. Let that sink in. It means you're likely to get rusty on silly interview puzzles if you've been doing real work for to long.

👤 gregjor
If you don’t have US citizenship or a green card that’s an additional hurdle.

Consider freelancing for US companies to find one that will sponsor a visa. You will most likely bypass the leetcode interview process.

Optimizing for the interview seems like a waste of time to me, but if you’re determined to get into one of the companies that does that I guess you have to play along. Ideally you get referred by contacts and bypass the filtering nonsense.

👤 wreath
I think the question you should be asking yourself, if you do study for the interview and land a job, do you think would do a good enough work to keep the job?

I'd hire someone who delivered software to solve real problems regardless over someone who is able to grind the leetcode stuff any day of the week. Although I'm almost sure studying the fundamentals + system design for the interview will improve your technical skills, but there is a lot more to a software developer than just that.