How He Got a $240K Software Eng Job, Got Through Depression, and More (ft. Joma Tech)

so the other day I interviewed Joe METEC who is a tech youtuber / a former data scientist who worked at Facebook and BuzzFeed and in this part of the interview we talked about his transition from data science to software engineering as well as his life and career in general so let's just dive into it so my first question is I understand that you decided to switch from data science to sovereign Jim mm-hmm could you tell us why he decided to make a switch yeah so I think I think I reached the point where well I guess it gets a little bit personal like when when I was working at Facebook there was a time where I kind of just like burnt out because of like videos and work and and the reason was there's like two reasons I'll do the work first for the work it was because like it was getting like a little bit harder we did a project that was a bit more a bit more stressful because like there's huge implications for what we did and like it like monetary implications so and then I also like switched teams like switch sub teams and there were a lot of reorg on on my team so that kind of made like things not super stable and then for videos I think I was at a point where I felt like I was too pressured to do it like I added too much artificial pressure to myself saying like oh I should make this video at this time every week for example at like Thursdays but but the issue of that is especially when you're working with sponsors or you have friends or you have a life it's kind of hard to meet the deadline exactly at that time right because there's a lot of factors so then I think at one point I just got like burnt out a little bit and then and then I kind of took a break but that break allowed me to think about my life in a more holistic way and then because I had more time to think about it I was like huh like maybe data science is not right for me maybe video is not right for me you know I started asking a lot of questions and then at that point I thought okay in five years or imagine if I want to work on something for five years do I want to be a really good data scientist like analytics or do I want to be really good as for engineer I was like software engineering sounds cooler because you can actually build stuff and I thought to myself like imagine in the in a situation where I had to work for a start-up or I want to do my own startup what would be more useful me being able to build the product myself or me being able to analyze like data myself but the thing is for me I think like when you're doing a start-up it's it's very easy to get insights from the data in the beginning because all you want or you care about is like what's the retention of the users how many new users are getting already using this feature nothing complicated right so gaining more skills for data science doesn't translate well to being a very effective worker and at a startup right so I thought being a software engineering like being a software engineer might be more like maybe more fitting to me and then the other reason is just like I feel like I want to build things because I've always been like that and I also had a CS degree so I might as well you know use it yeah right so it sounds like your like ultimate goal long term goal is to do a start-up or worker starter back then yes now like I'm not that sure anymore because like cuz uh like you know I've grown I've changed and then yes like if I can do a startup yes but it's not my ultimate goal but I do think about it sometimes like it's just in case you know in case I want to do it right yeah I think another thing you mentioned is that you like building things because you maybe tell us a little bit more about yeah yeah so um like not into software related realm when I used to be when I was a kid I used to play these games and sometimes they're like these mini games were thinning games or you could like build things and it's pretty useless like it's not even part that the normal story like for example Kingdom Hearts you could build like your spaceship and stuff like that and I just really like building that spaceship and then just see I don't know it's just like yeah I usually like playing with like Legos I used to like I used to like tinkering with things there was something called like rainmeter it sits on Windows is where you could like make your own widgets on your desktop and I just like to make things nice you know are like useful and yeah so I think in my mind oh also videos right like videos is also something that you kind of build and create cuz yeah so and I also like Photoshop I feel like you know like making new images out of like multiple images and stuff like that so I thought to myself like you know I was always like a builder kind of a guy may be suffering cheering this for me yeah so you felt like indentifies you weren't it you weren't doing enough building yeah no you don't you don't build anything at all because I especially what I was doing yeah you nothing you do is really permanent you usually just do something do an analysis or basically do something such that you could convince other people to build stuff but you never actually build your own thing especially at a big company where data engineering is already all done all the pipelines are done all you have to do is just get some data and like spit out insights like yeah you don't you don't build anything that sounds pretty frustrating for you it depends cuz like some part of me do like doing analysis and like understanding the product inside out because I really like to spend time and understand users so that was fun and but yes it sucks that there's nothing that I can show for right I can't be like oh yeah I built that or like I did this you know so yeah so I think that's the reason I see mm-hmm so it sounds like you liked some of the things that you were doing as a Luna scientist oh yeah for sure but they were like these other things that you missed right right right okay and when you say now you took a break what do you mean by that well like a couple of weeks yeah I took um I think I took two weeks off like of work and then I also oh no I still kept I kept making videos also but then at one point I stopped making videos for like like months and then and then I also went to work but then I also like took a lot of vacation during work so I was literally doing like nothing right kind of like no you know yes I was doing like nothing so that's the break that was taking all right so you know and then eventually you decided to take the leave or take the leap and leave your job pretty much yeah what was that process like yeah so yeah so at first like um I didn't think about leaving my job directly I was thinking about like oh maybe I could switch teams you know cuz because maybe the problem isn't the job maybe it's like a team or something like that so I thought about switching teams I thought about doing like internal transfer to software engineering and stuff like that and Indiana like the the one that would make me the most money would be if I switch companies to do software so that's like why I chose that and I just want to say like it's like usually I wouldn't quit my job before getting like another job in hand because I think that's pretty risky especially for someone if if you're like on a visa for example then you have a limited time before you get like kicked out of the country so I would advise against that the reason that I did it is because I was pretty confident in terms of like because of my connections because of like am i studying and I did study during during the time I was still working on Facebook and I was still like practicing coding and stuff like that and I did do a few interviews right I just having like accepted an offer yet so I was pretty confident that I won't get a job in a short amount of time so that's why I was able to quit kind of early on and the reason why I quit pretty early was because I kind of want to start my vacation like pretty early Yeah right mm-hmm and you know you mentioned that you started practicing software engineering interviews hmm how did you prepare for them write the code yeah so the first thing I did was like yeah I just started like opening leak code I bought a premium membership and then I just you know started practicing easy questions first and I just did them grinded them I did like one or two per day because I wanted to take it slow right because I was still working at Facebook but I'll take it I took it slow so I just did like one or two questions a day and and then right before an interview I would do a lot of them I would do a lot of them beforehand and then I also bought like elements of programming interview so I that complimented my my leak coding sessions and then also one thing I did was some people people told me to well like I read on I read blind a lot and they told me to practice like whiteboarding unfortunately I don't have a whiteboard so I just took like a piece of paper I take a pen and then usually I try to solve it on a paper first and then write on a computer and then yeah that's it would you like run the code oh yes right okay yeah on the code you can run the code so yes I would write it like on paper and now I would just copy it on the code and then I would run it and then see if it's good or not I see yeah and then for system design I just read a lot have I read something called rocking the system design interview where they have like these simulation questions were like oh try to build Instagram or like build Twitter and now I would read how they did it you know like load balancers blah blah blah and stuff like that databases and then whenever I don't understand something they have a link to click into like different database type like like sequel database sorry relational versus non relational and then you just get more and more knowledge and then that's how you can answer these questions yeah would you recommend somebody else go through the same path and use the same resources yeah I think so I think it worked it was working pretty well for me yeah nice and so you you started preparing for those interviews you left a job you get prepared for you know those interviews and how was that can you tell us about like how the whole process was like to interview you numbers and maybe negotiate forever right yeah so I'll talk about like a few interviews but basically how it looks like it's like once you feel like you're pretty confident in your coding skills then what you do is yeah you start you start applying but that usually what happened for me was that I got kind of lazy so I just kind of I applied and then they tell me like okay let's schedule a phone screen or on-site and then that's like a deadline for me it's and that's when I start I should be pairing anyway so they yeah they do phone screens usually and then you prepare for that you do a few coding questions and then once you do this phone screen if if you pass it then they usually put you into like an on-site and on-site interviews and usually during on-site interviews there's like five or six interviews it's super long one of the longest one I've had was like from like 9:00 a.m. to like 5:00 p.m. I think it was like six interviews and one lunch interview it was so freaking long like my throat started to hurt I don't know towards the end yeah so then yeah so then after the on-site you know you wait and you really and you hope that the recruiter sends you a congratulation email and then if they do that's awesome for some companies it might be slower some companies might be faster and then usually what they do is that they might ask you like well before the interview they might ask you're like oh really what kind of compensation do you expect to have usually I would say like say something like higher than what you currently have just so that you can you know at least get a boost and then yeah and then they also ask you like oh do you are you interviewing with other people they always ask that the reason why they ask that is because if you are they might expedite the process they might make it faster and then once you get that information and you say that you have an offer that's where they give you the numbers they usually give you like the base compensation bonus and then also equity and yeah so you get that number sometimes or I should most of the time you can just ask for more even even if you have like no counter offers for some reason like they would just be okay with this don't increase it but another strategy that's really good is if you have a counter offer from another company so you see which one has the higher compensation and you bring that to the one with the lower compensation and then don't like match you if you're lucky they might even like increase it to more than match yeah but usually they don't do that they just like match it because there's no reason to yeah and then yeah so like a little tip companies that are like well known that most people want to go work for them they will always match and then for companies who need more engineers and they don't have the brand capital as much they might give you like more more compensation to try to compensate for like the brand so what you can do is that yeah you could like understand which companies actually pay more and then you apply for them and then you get their high offer and then make the big company like not the big companies the one of the good brands so like match it yes does that make sense yeah it makes sense so about the compensation that those recruiters give you because you get into like specific numbers oh yeah sure I don't mind um so yeah I'll talk about like like two different offers I've had and then okay so one of the offer I remember was like around aw crap I guess I don't remember to break down but I think it was like it's like 170 to 180 total compensation right and then I just asked for more and then I was able to get like 200 like 200,000 total conversation right yeah and then I and then I got an offer from another company that company paid more cuz like their total compensation was like it was like - 220 or 230 so I just brought that to the other company and then the other company was able to yeah match it to like 230 okay total compensation and then I brought that back to the other company and then that company was able to increase it by like 10k so I was like 240 or whatever and then I brought that back to the other company and then the other company was able to match to 40 and then I just took it yeah so it was basically like a big brand company versus a company wish got a smaller company yeah I'd say it's don't big ish basically both of them are public I guess right no mm-hmm okay the next question I have is so you mentioned that you know you you felt burnt out and a little bit depressed but what do you think made you burnt out I haven't depressed yeah so yeah it was the combination of like stress for my videos and work basically basically what I felt like was you know every time I went home I had a hard day at work it's not like I could relax because I have to think about videos again so I think because of that I also put artificial stress on me always looking at the metrics like how many views I'm getting oh no I'm losing or like I'm not getting as much subscribers anymore so that took a toll on like my mental health and then that's why I burnt out and and I decided to take a break after that now right and how did you get through this tough time yeah I I think it was actually really hard because like when you burnt out or then I got kind of like really sad at one point and then it's kind of like a vicious circle right because you're sad you have like lower confidence and then you don't do as well like like you don't do as well just socializing you know things become harder you don't want to socialize you don't want to exercise you don't want to go out right and then but I read a lot of things online they told me to just move the first thing you want to do is make sure that you're not just always in bed because that's very dangerous right so they told me to just move even if you don't want to so the first thing I did was like okay whenever I have time for example I was lead coding to whenever I don't want to lead code anymore I would just like run outside thirty minutes or if I don't want to you know work at work dennah which is run outside sat Lisa gave me exercised yeah so I was just making sure that at least if my physical health is good then everything else comes second so I just prioritize my physical health and then I think that really helped because it just made me more clear my mind and then slowly but surely I focus on the small wins in my life and then I realized like okay this is actually not that bad you know I always think about you know back then if I think about my life right now I'd be pretty happy with that and then just being more realistic with your the view on your life because when you're sad like it's it feels like a cloud and you have like a bad perception of everything yeah so you just have to break that cycle I see so I was basically exercise moving your body oh yeah like hang out friends even if you don't want to even if you don't want to yeah I think so because like you don't want to do anything when you're sad but like you just have to force yourself to do it like if you do feel good afterwards then you know that it was worth than you mm-hmm okay so now you're feeling much better mMmmm yeah okay so now that you're sort of back on your feet mm-hmm what do you think you're gonna do with your channel yeah so I think with my channel I'm not gonna put as much emphasis on my channel as before cuz back then I was like oh my god I'm gonna be youtuber you know I put too much pressure on myself now it's kind of like okay I want to interview a lot of people because one I get to learn a lot from them and I could be more casual about it I could show Who I am like for real cuz like sometimes I do feel like I you know on my videos I'm artificially like trying to be someone else or something like that right now I kind of just want to be more myself and show Who I am for reals so yeah so I think there's gonna be like more interviews there's gonna be more me talking to the camera and then hopefully when I have time kind of want to restart like the startup series you know like I guess I could talk about one thing that's that I haven't told anyone but like I was thinking of season 2 a startup series it won't be called startup anymore it would be like boot camp where you know I you know cuz my start failed and then what I'll do is I want to go into coding boot camp to get a job later oh yeah like movie series now that cool and it would be like anime themed cuz you know do you watch anime yeah so you know like your academia yeah yeah basically kind of like that you know the boot camp would be Kalaheo alright I have two more questions left the first one is is there anything that you've changed your mind about within the past few years um yeah I I think just like my values have changed like back then it was always like trying to reach for the next milestone you're like it could be subscribers on monetary and stuff like that I think the biggest difference now is trying to understand that you have to have like values that you really care about that or like goals that you don't just reach and be done with it but goals that make you a better person like for example you want to be a more honest person or you want you know to have strengthened your relationships if like everyone and stuff like that things that you can't reach and say like oh now what I'm done but things that even working towards it it's something valuable and fruitful for you I am are those like actually your goals yeah I think so well like one of like my goals is just to have as many stories to tell as possible it sounds silly but it kind of makes sense because I you know like I still want to you know succeed in life because if you succeed in life you have more stories to tell you have more freedom to do a lot of different things because having a lot of stories to tell or having a lot of memory anchors in your life it makes you feel like your life is longer because imagine if you just worked out a job for two years and you didn't do anything else then you kind of don't remember your days anymore because nothing special happened yeah but if you've had a lot of different anchor in your life like for example even sometimes negative anchors like oh you broke up with X then yeah then you kind of remember but at least there's a lot of things that's happening your lives right wow that's kind of like my life philosophy yeah that's pretty profound actually my other question what's gonna be do you have any like philosophy but it sounds like oh yeah that's it mm-hmm okay so that wraps up this part of the interview in case you want to watch the part of this interview where we talked about data science you know about what it's like to be a data scientist and how to become one I'm gonna put a link to that video in the description below and thank you as always for watching my videos I will see you guys in the next one

Channel: CS Dojo

Views: 300,293

Rating: 4.9112744 out of 5

Keywords: joma tech, coding, techlead, interview, csdojo, cs dojo, software enginereing job, software engineering job, software engineer job, how to get a software engineer job

Id: gFGuQp9Vde8

Length: 22min 18sec (1338 seconds)

Published: Sun May 12 2019