i finally got a software engineering job

yes so some of you probably already know uh i finally got a software engineering job now i'm super grateful and super relieved that i don't have to interview anymore i mean interviewing is super stressful and it's not that fun like i i really hate interviewing well i mean actually i i think i hate before interviewing because that's when you get the most stressed but then when you're interviewing and if you're actually doing really well it actually feels kind of good it feels kind of good but i'm glad i don't need to leak code anymore i mean i did it so much that it kind of became a habit every day i just go home lead code a little bit and a part of me kind of a part of me kind of wants to just continually coding every day just to keep my skills fresh my interviewing skills fresh you know you never know if you want to switch jobs or not so the reason why i didn't say anything for the longest time is because i didn't want to jinx it i wanted everything to be confirmed and finalized before telling you but uh yeah i've been working for a few weeks now and um yeah it seems okay i i think i got the job for sure now so i can tell you guys now so due to privacy concerns i'm i'm not gonna share which company it is um maybe once i quit i can share which company it is but um you know you know i don't plan on quitting anytime soon but i can tell you that the company is part of fang i'm incredibly happy that i got this job offer uh i'm actually really grateful and um yeah like it's always kind of been my dream job back then and yeah so for full transparency sake uh i have a total compensation of 278 000 for the first year and then in the later years it's less than that because i had a sign-on bonus so i want to tell you exactly how i transitioned from data scientist to software engineer from the day that i wanted to switch to software engineering so i was still at facebook when i decided to transition into software engineering i talked to my friends one of them was a data engineer who switched into software engineering to get some info i asked them about different companies what the culture was like what kind of questions they asked during interviews what was the pay how long does it take for the recruiters to respond back what tech stack they use etc etc so i was just gathering information so i kind of already had a list of companies that i wanted to apply to during the same week i refreshed my python skills i mean i haven't coded in like forever i think the last time i coded was during my internship at linkedin which was winter 2015. i used python 2 before but i decided to relearn or slash learn python 3 just because it's newer and it's almost the same thing except for a few little syntax differences so i had to relearn how python does their list comprehensions array strings lambdas their syntax for dictionaries their string stuff and also like common libraries that we would usually use in a coding interview so that took me about two days yeah then i started lead coding and i actually just focused on the easy questions and the reason why is because i i couldn't even do them so i wouldn't even try to do the medium questions until i could flash the easy questions by the way no one uses the term flash i use the term flash because in bouldering when you flash a climb it means you did it in one shot so for interviews i mean for interview questions i say you flash the question if you just run it once and you get it on your first try without looking at the answers so i did about 30 to 40 easy questions before i can actually flash these easy questions and that took about two to three weeks not bad i did like one to two questions a day i was slowly practicing i mean i still had a full-time job so i didn't have that that much time i was also kind of sad at that time so i exercised a lot to try to cope with that and that also took away from my coding time failing this legal question really wasn't great for my self-esteem especially at the beginning when i was failing all these questions it it felt pretty bad i mean like my self-esteem was pretty low and then in addition you have to grind these questions and every question that you miss you just feel like uh you're a failure so it was kind of hard in the beginning but in the end it was worth it after that i started doing medium questions now to this day i don't think i can flash medium questions i mean they're pretty hard some medium questions are a lot easier than others it really depends because it kind of depends on your strengths and your weaknesses some of them i could flash but some of them i cannot i can't even solve them so it's kind of hard to say but i still did a lot of them and then the more you do the easier they become in the meantime i decided to actually start applying to jobs because i told myself that i needed to put deadlines because without deadlines i'm just going to slack and i'm not going to practice seriously so i polished my resume because my resume was kind of built in a more data science pme role so a lot of the bullet points i had to change to make it more software related for example for my data science job i would focus more on the data engineering aspect of the job and then for my pm experience i would talk about how i prototyped these products which requires coding so that i could present it to clients and stuff like that getting interviews was actually really easy for me because i've built a foundation ever since i started doing internships so over the course of all those internships i've built connections friends you know and a whole network of recruiters slash friends so for literally any tech company i have at least a friend who works there or a recruiter that i can contact because i've already interviewed there for internships the reason why i can contact these recruiters is because back then when i was interviewing for internships i actually got offers from them and because they remember me they'll answer my email and they'll give me at least a phone interview so yeah waterloo is the because you get a whole network of tech professionals you'll get a referral for any company you want to apply for as long as you made friends back in college and i don't want to brag but i had a handful of friends in college so i wanted to study full-time and go ham on the coding because i knew that getting the interviews was not my problem my problem was actually passing the interview so i decided to quit my job and lead code full time but that didn't happen i ended up doing youtube a lot and i pretty much studied the same amount as before okay maybe not the same amount but just a little bit more so i studied about like two to four hours a day which means like three to five questions i usually do about three to five questions per day and then maybe on the weekends slightly more maybe five hours i was getting more and more familiar with the questions i was recognizing the patterns i was learning the tricks right and it's not even about intelligence or or being smart or anything it's literally just practice because the questions end up looking the same they only change the context or the wording or the storyline behind it but it's essentially the same thing so four weeks later i had my first phone interview and i passed almost all of them because it's they're not super super hard it's only like a first smoke screen and most of the time you might get a question that you've seen already on leak code so that makes a lot easier it's technically kind of cheating but whatever after the phone interviews i also asked to push the on-site interviews as far as possible because i just wasn't confident in myself yet so i wanted more time to study so i did like 150 to 200 questions by then but i didn't feel like i was getting that much better so i bought the book elements of program oh yeah i think i have it so i bought the book elements of programming interviews in python because i wanted to practice coding using a pen and paper unlike using a computer and a platform because that is a lot more similar to when you're asked the question using a whiteboard during interviews i think it's similar to hard mode when you use pen and paper to write your code because you have to be a lot more thoughtful because you can't erase then during real interviews i actually have a white board and i could use the eraser it's gonna feel a lot easier so two or three days before the on-site interview i would stop doing youtube and i would study all day for three days i would order delivery so that i don't waste time so i would study around 10 to 12 hours per day before the interview i would do a combination of leak code and paper coding using elements of programming interview i would also go to glassdoor to look at the interview question for that specific company and do them i also ask around my friends to see what kind of questions they got during their interview usually the questions won't be the same but at least you get a sense of what the companies like to ask for example facebook they don't ask dynamic programming questions but google they love to ask dynamic programming questions if i learned that the company asked system design questions then i would go read grokking the system design interview and i would just try to you know take everything in and hope that i remember so at that point i've done around 230 questions on the code and i don't know how many i've done on pen and paper i actually over studied because there were so many things that i practiced for that i didn't use like for example union find for disjoint sets i didn't use that sorry i can't think of any examples um i've already forgotten everything i've learned because i already got an offer so i don't get so yeah i passed a few of those interviews and i failed some of them and then using the offers i kind of negotiated so that my tc would go up and then until no one can increase anymore i just accepted the offer saying it now it doesn't sound like much it's just study and that's it but while i was studying holy i felt like but i was lucky that i had roommates and friends to support me when i most need them to tell me that i'm being too hard on myself to calm me down i kind of just wanted to say again that thank you for understanding when i was away from youtube for so long and thank you for everyone who sent all these positive messages to me encouraging me to find a new job in software engineering i really really appreciate that thank you so much i love you [Music] all right it's a new chapter in my life i think it's a pretty good start [Music] more

Channel: Joma Tech

Views: 890,803

Rating: 4.9178953 out of 5

Keywords: joma, vlog, software engineer, computer science, how to get a programming job, software engineer interview, software development, coding, leetcoding, programming, coding interview

Id: uxRf7KS3abo

Length: 11min 45sec (705 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 20 2019

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