I'm in a similar position - a tech lead role at a Big N - and have recently been doing some interviews for senior roles at FAANG. The most frustrating thing is knowing I can't really leverage anything I've learned over the past 7 years of my career in the interview, at least at the early stages. I've been "studying" Leetcode after work for a month or so but always seem to make stupid mistakes under the time pressure of the interview. I don't want to spend my entire career at one company, but it's clear I'll need to be very lucky and/or practice much harder on my own time if I want anything like a similar position/salary elsewhere.
This is something I find so disturbing, and I experience similar.
I feel extremely little of what I'm doing in my real, actual, job, helps me in advancing in my career. Unless maybe if I choose to stay at my current company until retirement lol.
Otherwise, why bother doing anything more than the bare minimum to get by at work? It would be a far better investment of time and effort to grind leetcode and practice for interviews, instead of going above and beyond to excel at my job. At least until I get into an "endgame company" where I feel it's worth staying long term.
If you want a good career, working on your interviewing skills is the most important thing. Networking and resume fluff are close seconds. Job skill is almost irrelevant. It's an ugly truth.
I think the answer is we need more innovation. We need a million small startups instead of a dozen tech giants. Software scales but starting up is a moonshot.
My personal career epiphany was moving from a tech giant to a late-stage, pre-IPO startup. The amount of freedom and range of challenges I dealt with were exhilarating. Did it pay as much? Not in the beginning, but I was given the room to grow.
At some rare companies people ask questions about real-world scaling which has been nice to leverage some actual knowledge but that's usually just a small part of the process and almost treated as a soft-skill which is kind of hilarious.
We just really want to hire a senior dev who can spit out highly optimized code that in the real-world would be handled by a stable open source library rather than people who have built stable systems.
