I’m in the middle of sending out applications and considering all the things I should refresh on. Does anyone have some good resources or practices they run through to get refreshed or otherwise prepared for technical and skill/personal interviews?
Ex. sites, blogs, yt videos to refresh on data structures. Checklist of things to look for when researching companies. Questions to ask recruiters during an interview. etc.
You sound like you have an inflated opinion of your programming skills and sense of not belonging / being unlike others. I may be wrong, I don’t know you at all, but that’s what your comments makes me think - and in that case you may want to check both that ego and self-flagellation before it bites you back.
In programming jobs, there’s lot of people very good at programming but less so at social skills, it’s very frequent, I see those profiles a lot at job interviews. In that situation, you have to understand that many people are like you - and even those who don’t for the most part are not more or less able to do their job nor less smart. People thinking they’re better at programming than the rest that way are generally rightly seen as assholes, and they most often than not are detrimental to projects, as well as despised by most.
Once you get that, you have to remember to not fall into the trap of thinking that you have the higher, more important, hard skills and that this plus your poor social skills excuses you from being nice and judging questions from other as stupid or unimportant - and at interviews they’re generally prepared beforehand and have mostly deeper reasons than just the question being asked. Moreover, once you realize that many other people are actually knowing much more than you without being assholes, that might be a hard reality check.
Many people are not passionate about programming, but MANY also are, and are very competent. There’s nothing special about anyone that makes him/her immune from being outed for not being nice at interviews.