Respectfully, You are not putting in 40--45 hours a week if you are

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

All of the extra bits of work you have to do outside of the 40-45 to stay "interview ready" count as work, youre just not getting paid.

Speak to other professional fields about the requirements they have for getting a job. Even in ones where there is an expectation of continuing education like for doctors, that is usually covered both in time and money by the employers of said doctors, not just something they are expected to moonlight on.

The other professions are even more agahst when they hear things like having to go through 10 round interviews or being grilled on the same set of college basics that dont get used in the day job, as a part of every single interview

At some point since the dotcom bubble, employers figured out a way to convince software engineers that since a bunch of nerds who were interested in this skillset as a hobby were doing it in their free time, the rest of us should be doing that too

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JustExAWS a day ago | parent [-]

How much extra time do you think it takes to summarize what you did at the end of a project? I do that anyway on the job during working hours to prepare for performance reviews and put it in our performance tracking system.

The banal “thought leadership” posts I’ve done on LinkedIn was also done during working hours. It’s encouraged at my level as marketing for the company and it also helps me.

I work remotely, do you really think I don’t do all this during working hours?

> Speak to other professional fields about the requirements they have for getting a job. Even in ones where there is an expectation of continuing education like for doctors, that is usually covered both in time and money by the employers of said doctors, not just something they are expected to moonlight on.

We get $1000 per completed professional AWS certification and a few others the first time and renewal and have time to study between projects. Even when I didn’t work in consulting and working in product companies - the last one as the lead architect - I took time during working hours to study.

You did see where I said I haven’t done a side project outside of work for my entire 30 year career?

> The other professions are even more agahst when they hear things like having to go through 10 round interviews or being grilled on the same set of college basics that dont get used in the day job, as a part of every single interview

My interview at AWS was one full day and five rounds of behavioral questions. But all of my other interviews were two rounds and then an offer. The last two companies I worked for before AWS, it was talking to the director and CTO about business outcomes and strategy and my previous experience. Do you really think high up people in their 40s are going to ask another 49 year old to balance an AVL tree?

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lovich a day ago | parent [-]

Well then congratulations, you seem to have progressed high up enough in your career to not have to deal with that.

I have literally never had an interview process with a company consist of less than 4-5 hours of interview rounds or an equivalent sized take home project. Roughly 50-60 interview cycles over 12 years. That includes companies where I was referred in by the hiring manager.

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MarcelOlsz 9 hours ago | parent [-]

Tell me about it. I'm in the 9th circle of interview hell and if I wrote a blog post about my recent experiences it would die as a [flagged] post because it seems too made up.

	▲	lovich 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I just today spoke with a recruiter for a position that is 3 steps back in my career, but asking for more skills than I have. The compensation is also going back about 5-6 years in nominal payment, not even accounting for inflation. It’s titled and compensated like what looks to me a 3-6 year in their career senior engineer working at a successful but not mag7 level company like a DraftKings. They won’t even move to the first stage of the interview process until their CTO has personally read and approved it. At this point I’m more mystified as to why everyone’s wasting their time like this on filtering. I can’t see a rational situation where it’s worth executive time to bother filtering for a role that’s so minor to the organization, but that’s the circus we’re in now so I guess I’ll jump through the hoops