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.

Who said anything about working harder?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45089377

The company gets a simple deal from me. They put the amount of money in my account they agreed to every month and in return they get 40-45 hours a week from me and all of my experience and skills.

They want me to fly out to a customer’s site or sit on a zoom call to close a deal? They got me. They want me to lead a large cloud implementation? No problem. They want a 50+ page management consulting style assessment with pretty diagrams? Say the word. They have a customer with an empty AWS account and they want someone who can do AWS architecture from the “DevOps” [sic] perspective and development? Say the word.

What they don’t get from me is burnout, time away from my wife and exercise in the evening, weekends or on call work. They get 40-45 hours of work from me.

It doesn’t take that much time to write down a summary of what you accomplished every quarter and keep an updated resume and in my case go on LinkedIn and post a banal “thought leadership” bullshit post once a quarter to keep me on the top of people’s mind if things go sideways at my current employer.

I would much rather be in my position where interviewing means some behavioral questions and talking to people than having to grind leetcode and reverse a btree on the whiteboard.

> 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?

Do you think good products just sell themselves? Do you think marketing departments exist because companies love to waste money? There's your answer.

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.