Lesson 5 - Interviewing is a separate skill from working and should be practiced at least once every quarter.

More than anything, interviews test your storytelling ability and your willingness to practice a number of mutually known questions beforehand.

Contrary to popular beliefs, interviewers do not prefer you to demonstrate your problem-solving skills on the spot. Rather, interviewers prefer you to demonstrate that you have prepared and practiced answering a set of questions that are frequently asked in an industry. It is not uncommon for an interviewer to ask you questions that are, word-by-word, straight from the same interview-prep book or online resource that everyone in the industry has been using. Examples of this include Vault Guide to Finance Interviews for finance interviews and LeetCode for software engineering interviews. Your job for this portion - the technical portion - is to play the game and give your interviewers the answers they want.

Once you have practiced to a point where you know how to approach a question as soon as you see it, you are then ready to proceed to the other portion of the interview - the behavioral portion. For this portion, your job is to practice telling stories about your past experience that are simple and easy to remember. Your stories might revolve around a select few experiences that you will eventually know by heart, and that is perfectly fine. Rather than trying to present a complete picture and worry about every little detail, it is far more important for you to paint a story where you rise to every occasion and take actions that lead to a superb, quantifiable, result. Everything else is supplementary.

Although interviewing skills are rarely needed on most jobs, they are part of a game that you will have to master. One way to continuously up your game is to interview at least once every quarter. This way you will not only maintain your interviewing skills, but you will also know what your true opportunity cost is every quarter!