I normally try and do “fun” work. This largely depends on how autonomous your job is. I was a PhD student doing research for a company and I received very little oversight for 3 years.

The supervision I did receive was great though. They understood needing to take a break and slow down. At those point I would generally read papers, watch PyData talks (highly recommend them, like inspirational ted talks for data people), or contribute to open source to learn about new tools or design paradigms.

I interviewed for a position that I was comfortably qualified for. As soon as they mentioned a 3 hour whiteboard interview in person I politely hung up the zoom call.

On the flip side, I had a company give the best interview process of all time. They told you how many people were remaining in the rounds. The programming task was to implement a hugging face model as a FastAPI. There was also a short video interview that took 5 minutes if you had basic ML knowledge. Likely took 1-2 hours tops and it was actually fun.