Fairly recently I left my job at a startup (I've been in startups for 4 years as a software enginer).
Every single day I am practicing interview questions. I am talking with recruiters on the phone. I am talking with HEADHUNTERS on the phone (not the same as recruiters). I am doing tech phone screens. I am doing take home projects. And I am going to tech meetups.
And I haven't even gotten to point in the process where I would be spending the entire day doing an onsite interview, so when that starts happen in a couple weeks I'll be even more busy.
I have perhaps over-prepared, but boy do the results show. I've passed every single one of my phone interviews and been invited to an onsite interview for Google, Cruise automation, Uber, Linkedin, Twilio, and a few other smaller startups.
2 years ago, when I was also looking for jobs, I took my job search much less seriously. And the results were predictably much less good. I was only about 50-50 on passing phone interviews, and only ended up getting 2 offers, and they were at no name startups.
Zero offers from any of the big 5 tech companies, as well as many failed interviews.
This time around my success has been much much better, because of how seriously I am taking the process. And this success is going to add up to literally 10s of thousands of dollars in pay increases.
Take your job search seriously. The difference in pay between "top" tech companies, and rando startups is 10s of thousands of dollars, and perhaps even over a hundred thousand dollars when you add up ALL the benefits/stock/401k matching/bonus/ect. Obviously money isn't everything, but it still matters.
Fairly recently I left my job at a startup (I've been in startups for 4 years as a software enginer).
Every single day I am practicing interview questions. I am talking with recruiters on the phone. I am talking with HEADHUNTERS on the phone (not the same as recruiters). I am doing tech phone screens. I am doing take home projects. And I am going to tech meetups.
And I haven't even gotten to point in the process where I would be spending the entire day doing an onsite interview, so when that starts happen in a couple weeks I'll be even more busy.
I have perhaps over-prepared, but boy do the results show. I've passed every single one of my phone interviews and been invited to an onsite interview for Google, Cruise automation, Uber, Linkedin, Twilio, and a few other smaller startups.
2 years ago, when I was also looking for jobs, I took my job search much less seriously. And the results were predictably much less good. I was only about 50-50 on passing phone interviews, and only ended up getting 2 offers, and they were at no name startups.
Zero offers from any of the big 5 tech companies, as well as many failed interviews.
This time around my success has been much much better, because of how seriously I am taking the process. And this success is going to add up to literally 10s of thousands of dollars in pay increases.
Take your job search seriously. The difference in pay between "top" tech companies, and rando startups is 10s of thousands of dollars, and perhaps even over a hundred thousand dollars when you add up ALL the benefits/stock/401k matching/bonus/ect. Obviously money isn't everything, but it still matters.