Tech companies usually require from you to:

- go through at least 4 stages (screening, tech challenge, systems design, chat with managers). You need at least 3 weeks to go through this in a sane manner

- You need to know about tons of topics (distributed systems, concurrency, microservices, k8s, ci/cd, databases, OS, networking). It’s common for engineers to know a little bit about everything, but when asked about something in particular in an interview, you cannot expect deep knowledge

- good luck trying to convince them that it doesn’t matter if you don’t have professional experience in $language, that you are rather an agnostic software engineer with experience in different progr languages and frameworks

- if you don’t craft your cv with proper buzzwords, you won’t get a chance to get interviewed. The ones who read your cv first are: machines (that are inflexible) and hr recruiters that know nothing about tech besides buzzwords

- good luck making a single mistake in the tech interview. Since the company has 100s of other candidates, they are only looking for the best of the best

Honestly, I don’t know whats wrong with using ai to “prepare” for interviews. I wish things were simpler, though (just come as you are, we talk for a couple of hours and if then you get a yes/no answer)