Five years without a single interview will leave you rusty, and I knew passive review wouldn't fix that. So before I applied anywhere, I built a structured plan. I enrolled in an interview prep course, scheduled dozens of mock interviews with engineers I found through various platforms, and put serious time into system design. Not just reading about it. I whiteboarded distributed systems from scratch and stress-tested my explanations out loud. It took about two months before I felt like I was operating at the level the top-tier companies expect. Even then I wasn't sure it'd be enough. I sourced interviews every way I could. I leaned on former colleagues for referrals, woke up dormant LinkedIn connections, answered inbound recruiter messages, and used a few lesser-known platforms that connect engineers straight with hiring teams. The goal was volume, because volume gives you leverage and calibration both. The first few onsites were rough. Not failures, but I could feel the gap between my prep and how I actually performed under pressure. By the fifth or sixth loop I started to settle. By the tenth I knew exactly how to pace a coding round, when to talk through my reasoning versus just write code, and how to structure a ↓
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