Prepping for interviews has been a big deal forever in most other industries though. It's considered normal to read extensively about a company, understand their business, sales strategies, finances, things like that, for any sort of business role.
I think tech is and was an exception here.
What you're describing sounds to me like just caring for the place we'll be spending half a decade or more and will have the most impact on our health, financial and social life.
I'd advise anyone to read the available financial reports on any company they're intending to join, execpt if it's an internship. You'll spend hours interviewing and years dealing with these people, you could as well take an hour or two to understand if the company is sinking or a scam in the first place.
Why should anyone do that in a world where fundamentals don't make sense? Yes, knowing how the company makes money is important (though that often is incomplete or unclear from what's publicly available), but knowing their 10-K or earnings reports? Too much.
kinda silly given the ability of most people to infer anything substantial through finances and marketing copy
really company reviews is all that matters and even that has limited value since your life is determined by your manger
best you can do is sus out how your interviewers are fairing
are they happy? are they stressed, everything else has so much noise to be worse than worthless
"Is the company consistently profitable or not?" and "Are revenue and profits growing over time, stable, or declining?" are very important questions to answer, particularly if stock grants are part of the compensation package.
For developers who work on products, getting a sense of whether the product of the team you'd be joining is a core part of the business versus speculative (i.e. stable vs likely to have layoffs) and how successful the product is in the marketplace (teams for products that are failing also are likely to be victims of layoffs) are also very important to understand.
So many ways to juice those numbers though.
And if your team is far from the money, what often matters much much more is how much political capital your skip level manager has and to what extent it can be deployed when the company needs to re-org or cut. Shoot, this can matter even if you're close to the money (if you're joining a team that's in the critical path of the profit center vs a capex moonshot project funded by said profit center).
This is one thing I really like about sales engineering. Sales orgs carry (relatively) very low-BS politically.
It matters a lot whether the organization is growing. If you get assigned to a toxic manager in a static organization then you're likely to be stuck there indefinitely. In a growing organization there will be opportunities to move up and out to other internal teams.
I remember being told this during my interview prep classes in college in 2008. Interviewing was so much more formal even then (in the NYC area): business casual attire, (p)leather-bound resume folios, expectations of knowing the company, etc. I definitely don't miss any of that nonsense.
I recently showed up to a new startup interview, with a similar folio (with printed copies of my resume, and a tablet of graph paper), and it paid off.
I was in a small conference room with the two co-founders, and of them hadn't seen my resume, and was trying to read it on his phone while we were talking.
Bam. I whipped out printed copies for both of them, from my interview folio.
It was good standard advice even for programmers to know at least a little about the company going in. And you should avoid typos and spellos on your resume.
But no "prep" like months of LeetCode grinding, memorizing the "design interview" recital, practicing all the tips for disingenuous "behavioral" passing, etc.
I’m glad civil engineers can’t vibe build a dam.
I'm not glad people here can't avoid injecting casual AI-hate soundbites everywhere. Is there any particular objection you have, or just "AI bad"?