I was having lunch with a buddy of mine lately and we were talking about technical interviews. We've both gone through a few rounds of them in the last year, and my friend happens to be actively looking for a job so he had gone through one just days before our lunch.
He explained that the live coding portion didn't go as well as he had hoped — he said that he was asked to build a dynamic web page with only plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript and got an email a few days later saying he wasn't strong enough in those areas.
This got me thinking, and then I had a major revelation...
The Basic Idea
This friend of mine has made comments before that make it clear he doesn't have much interest in doing work after hours on his own time. I thought to myself, what if I told him that he could invest 100 hours of his own time and, at the end, he'd be paid $100 per hour, retroactively, for all of that time.
By spending 100 hours to sharpen up his HTML and JavaScript skills, he could easily pass a technical interview and land a job paying at least $10,000 more per year. If you do the math, that's $100 per hour for all of those hours invested.
To me, $100 per hour is a pretty motivational amount of money. I feel that it's almost become the new equivalent of "six figures" in the software world. Most people don't realize that they can effectively pay themselves that amount by putting in extra effort to invest in themselves.
How to Go About It
To some people, a hundred hours may seem intimidating. A lot of folks have families and other committments, and so the thought of putting in that many hours seems impossible.
The trick is, you don't have to rearrange your life around your goals. You can pretty easily work this time into just about any busy schedule. If you aren't able to dedicate big chunks of time to growing your skills, spread it out over the course of a year.
Surely everybody can find two hours per week to sharpen their skills and improve their career trajectory.
And if you do happen to be somebody who can invest big chunks of time, then you can choose between accelerating the process or keeping your journey going beyond those initial hundred hours.
If you can invest 10 hours per week, you'll have spent one hundred hours sharpening your skills in just two months.
If you then consider that 95% of people probably aren't doing this, it doesn't take long to realize that you'll start to stand out in your field very quickly, at which point job interviews will be a breeze and you'll have your choice of many offers to choose from.
Determine the Skills Necessary
In the case of my friend, he got some pretty specific feedback to work with. For some people, they may not know exactly where to start.
I would suggest you start out by first polishing your resume. A chunk of your time could be invested into fine-tuning your resume to attract more offers. If you spent the next week researching tactics to make your resume stand out, surely you'd put yourself ahead of a good percentage of your competition. And this is just within the first couple weeks.
The reason I suggest crafting your resume first is that I believe real job interviews are one of the best ways to get a feel for the specifics skills that companies are looking for and some sense of the common scenarios that they are working with.
You can also just look at job postings to try to find out what things companies are looking for. Are you trying to be a front-end developer? You'll probably want to brush up on your React. Are you looking to be more of a back-end developer? Look into things like Python and Kotlin.
You can use your hundred hours to build sample projects and create a presence on GitHub. This is something else that is so rare from what I have seen in my nearly two decades of experience. Having your code on public display is one of the best ways to let a potential employer get a feel for your skills, and it'll make you stand out above the crowd.
One nice side effect of having built up your own personal vault of projects is that you can use them to complement technical discussions during an interview process. Or, if you have a technical interview that you don't quite nail, you may be able to show off some of your code that accomplishes a similar goal (for example, "I'm having some trouble with this particular exercise but let me show you a similar example from a personal project of mine").
Reap the Ultimate Reward
Most people look for security in their jobs. In reality, a job can be taken away any day for any number of reasons. Real security is something that is inside each one of us.
It comes when we reach a point where we know we can provide value in our area of expertise. It comes when we know that, regardless of what happens with any particular opportunity, we'll always find the next one.
When you take the time to master the skills of your trade, you'll always know that skills, knowledge or interviewing will never be part of the problem.
Conclusion
If you're still with me, thanks for making it this far. There is obviously a bit of exaggeration in this post — you're not getting $10k upfront just for investing the time. At the same time, when you do unlock the $10k it comes at regular intervals and compounds over time.
In any case, start making time to work on your skills and your career will truly take off. You'll gain confidence, master interviews, and start getting offers you never thought were possible.