It's best to do all of this when you're employed and have been at a job for at least 2 years.
Focus on quality rather than quantity. Be selective. You can send out hundreds of CVs in a night, but you have a finite amount of emotional energy.
Network, but the most useful thing you'll get out of connections is information, not good-ole-boy introductions. Go to as many Meetups related to your interests as you can. (Most cities have data science meetups, Scala and Clojure and Python meetups, et al).
Limit yourself to one coding test per week. They're not hard or time-consuming but they're emotionally draining.
Get a good night's sleep before the interview. If you're unemployed, resist temptations to drink or keep an unusual schedule. You need to be "on" at 9:00 am.
Keywords in job specs don't mean a whole lot. A great HR team doesn't mean a great company, and vice versa. People on HN say, "I wouldn't want to work for a company that wrote job specs like that". Well, in reality, there are a lot of good companies out there with crummy HR. So don't get too obsessed over keywords because most of what's in a job-specs ("looking for candidate with a track record") is non-information.
Thanks again! By the way, I wish I could find breakfast or lunch meetups. The last thing I want to do after work is head out to the city, deal with parking, etc.
Focus on quality rather than quantity. Be selective. You can send out hundreds of CVs in a night, but you have a finite amount of emotional energy.
Network, but the most useful thing you'll get out of connections is information, not good-ole-boy introductions. Go to as many Meetups related to your interests as you can. (Most cities have data science meetups, Scala and Clojure and Python meetups, et al).
Limit yourself to one coding test per week. They're not hard or time-consuming but they're emotionally draining.
Get a good night's sleep before the interview. If you're unemployed, resist temptations to drink or keep an unusual schedule. You need to be "on" at 9:00 am.
Keywords in job specs don't mean a whole lot. A great HR team doesn't mean a great company, and vice versa. People on HN say, "I wouldn't want to work for a company that wrote job specs like that". Well, in reality, there are a lot of good companies out there with crummy HR. So don't get too obsessed over keywords because most of what's in a job-specs ("looking for candidate with a track record") is non-information.