You have provided no evidence why your technique is superior. By applying to a maximum number of roles, you are increasing your "attack surface". Also, in many cases, when you talk to the hiring manager, they can/will funnel you towards other managers and roles with a better fit.
Well, Oxide was the only job I applied to when I left Meta in 2022. My plan was to broaden my job search if Oxide didn't work out, but even then I'd only have applied to 3-5 places in the following round after vetting the company's culture and values.
I've always preferred this kind of targeted application -- I've applied to 5 jobs total in my ~15 year career and gotten 4 offers, two of which I accepted. Everyone has their own objectives they optimize for -- personally, I care most about building monuments of lasting value.
Because I have no desire to work for "just some company". I only talk to companies where I actually know I want to work there and feel I'd be a good fit for what they do. Maximizing "attack surface" is only useful if the only thing you care about is a paycheck regardless of from where.
When I was coming up in the 90s what I found was it was mostly conversational, sometimes with some whiteboarding although of a much more relaxed nature than contemporary whiteboarding. It was more a tool to help express your thoughts and draw pictures than writing code.
There were some companies like Microsoft who were starting to become known for being more intense, but I never came across that.
It wasn't until the mid-aughts that I started to see brain teasers, "real" whiteboarding, and other aspects that started to bleed into standard interviews.
I'm to understand that Microsoft was one of the companies that had more relaxed interviews in the early 90s, and then took a turn for the more intensive in the mid-90s.
Perhaps the turning point was Jim McCarthy's "beware of a guy in a room", which he meant both figuratively and literally, leading to a transition away from solo or shared offices or even cubicles for software engineers and toward open-plan arrangements. I think that his wisdom led first Microsoft, then the rest of the industry, to treat software engineers not as the darling whiz kids they were in the past, but more a cohort to be closely watched and controlled, as the company is risking a lot on them.
+1 to melatonin. It took me a very long time to dial in the right dose though. It’s not like it’s some miracle cure but it has helped a bunch with being able to fall asleep at a reasonable time, sleep through the night, and thus wake up at a reasonable time. Which of course helps a bit with everything else
That's part of the issue I had in terms of dialing in the right dosage. I was trying to use it off and on for about 20 years and could never get the right amount where it'd actually work at night but not leave me groggy in the AM. Part of the issue was for a long time it was hard finding the stuff in low enough dosages to even allow for this easily.
Turns out the answer is 500-600mcg for myself, but everyone's going to be different.
> so conditioned to being groggy in the mornings that I still find it hard to get up even if I feel fairly refreshed.
I am very much in the same boat. Mornings have never been my friend. Even the few restful nights and refreshed mornings I get are spoiled by learned grogginess and overstaying in bed.
I went through this once, but it was in the mid-90s when resources were scarcer and the band was not at all someone who charted.
Heard something between sets at a local club that blew my mind. Didn't think to ask. Set me down a path, posting across usenet boards, IRC, talking to people at shows, talking to friends. Plenty of suggestions of potential hits, and while a lot of those suggestions were also cool, it took me a few years to finally find it.
That journey was totally worth it though, as there's a lot of stuff I came across in my search that I still listen to today.
The angst is less about right now and more about the obvious conclusion if the trend continues that few, if any, of us will be gainfully employed in this space.
Sure, we can all claim to be the ones who actually are able to hold it right, or that we'll shift to doing something slightly a bit different. And that will be true for some subset of people. But the reality is that it's like that old trope of look to your left, look to your right, 2 of you won't be here at the end of the semester.
Even without the LK-99 debacle, I am *way* less excited about this than I was the original LK-99 announcement. The chance that this is real is close to 0%
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