Thanks for the kind words. Unfortunately I'm not sure the stress is worth it.
Also, it's not like I'm getting bombarded by FAANG recruiters anymore (where did they all go?), and I'm not going to submit my CV to a "black hole"...
I decided that I wanted a job at Google, so I did the only reasonable and started grinding Leetcodes, probably at the same level as Recursive Cactus. I even took two days a week off for a couple of months to just do leetcodes. ~10 hours every weekend was Leetcodes. I read the whole CLRS (and made sure that I understood 80% at least). I wrote a thesis. I studied maths. I dug deep into databases and distributed systems.
All this at the same time as I was working a full-time job as a softare engineer at a world-famous tech company and as a head of engineering at a startup.
I've been programming my whole life, and I've got a lot of experience with Java, C++ and Ruby, and now 10 years professionally. I've written operating systems, game engines, networking protocols and many products from the ground up. I get great feedback wherever I go and I learn systems very quickly, and I'm soon the "go to"-guy at a new place. I tend to out-experience the "old guys" that everyone look up to.
But Google? I was invited for a video interview. I think I might've miscommunicated my understanding of database transactions (though I got great feedback on my coding tests), but alas, from that point, the recruiter lost any interest they might've had. For some position, I had to ask multiple times to learn that it was internally filled.