I've been in this industry for a few years and I still don't get it. It seems like people in this industry constantly do things against their own interests to me.

In terms of interviews:

A lot of these practices are designed and driven by other developers, not PMs or business people. And yet most devs won't work for FAANG, and will likely have a much lower salary. And yet the ask from these dev interviewers is something like this:

- "You don't know language A and/or framework B that are very similar to language X and framework Y that you know very well? Sorry we can't hire you. We expect good devs to spend day and night reading up on the latest fashionable library, framework and language and have no life."

- "Can you spend several hours every day for the next few months studying leetcode? I hope you don't have performance anxiety, try Valium sometime. No, we won't expect you to solve arbitrary puzzles in front of a semi-hostile interviewer grilling you as your day job, it's just for kicks really."

- "Can you spend 4 hours doing this coding assignment as part of the interview?"

"We want you to do your best and include x,y,z and the kitchen sink and not just solve the problem (add 4-8+ hours)."

"Let's review your work -- you displayed exceptional skills and a deep understanding of our core competency. However, you didn't include our favorite coding style that you didn't happen to guess we would use --that you totally would've just adopted from day one during onboarding-- so we can't hire you."

"We didn't see X in your code. No we can't schedule a 15 minute interview for you to explain your 4-14 hour coding project, why you did what you did, and that X is actually in there on L56 -- we're busy and decided to review your code only for 5 minutes after a heavy lunch and already passed on you for someone else. Sorry. We will keep your resume on file to wipe our *sses with."

OR

(interviewer disappears like a ghost after dropping a 20+ hour coding project for you to do and never follows up after)

- "Can you build a full-stack app for us from scratch as the coding project? Oh no, you won't be building a full-stack app from scratch when you start with us, but we want someone who can do it in 5 minutes for the exactly 0-1 times we'll ever need it"

- "You haven't learned fancy new library/framework/language X yet? Are you a dinosaur?"
...4 months later...

"Fancy new library/framework/language X sucks, it turned out to be a fad. It turned out it doesn't do anything better than dinosaur library/framework/language D and is actually really buggy or complicated. What you _really_ need to know is fancy new library/framework/language Y, that's where it's at. We only want people who keep up with the industry."

Me now doing the mental math of how I completely fcked myself over going into this industry

The math:

Average expected time doing the job after leetcode, coding project interviews, open source, stack overflow, learning fancy library/framework/language/whatever:

60+ hours/week.

No you can't reduce that to a normal 40 hours/week unless you want to be a generic Java/Javascript code monkey, sir/madam.

Average salary: Not even near enough to justify that, considering the salaries of other engineering and STEM fields. Unless you count FAANG, which you probably won't be working for.

What did I get myself into?