Long-term Preparation - career goals and portfolios

Long Before The Interview

Think About Your Career

Do you enjoy building product? Or want to focus on testing or DevOps? Or maybe a security or AI domain expert? Do you prefer to be an IC (individual contributor) or a people manager? Acing a job interview should not be your ultimate goal.

If you want to stay in tech, read more about specializations

Create Your Dream Company List

The key to your career growth as a software engineer is not just to ace some job interviewers every 2 years, but you need to develop a good understanding (and be passionate) about how technology is solving the real world problems.

Try to compile a list of companies that you are interested in, and more info that you may care, like location, stock trend, etc.

How To Research A Company

• CrunchBase: find out fundings and other info about a startup company.
• Glassdoor: company reviews, salaries, and job interview experiences.
• Indeed Salaries: another source to check out salaries.
• company's blog
• wiki
• finance report (public companies)
• crunchbase (startups)
• news: TechCrunch, or follow topics on Google News.

Incubators and Startup Lists

• http://www.ycombinator.com/companies/
• https://breakoutlist.com/
• Wealthfront Career-Launching Companies List: https://blog.wealthfront.com/career-launching-companies-list/

Accumulate Your Professional Assets

Writing your resume could cause some serious headaches, and can easily delay the start of your job search. Try to accumulate some asset alone the way, so the resume would be just a quick snapshot at the time of the job application:

• if you are a front-end engineer, create a portfolio;
• if you have some code that do not mind sharing to the public, move it to GitHub;
• create contents and builds up your knowledge graph buy writing blogs, or in other forms (like notes on https://www.hackingnote.coms)