I'm Bad At Coding ... (My Software Engineering Journey)

i'm actually a terrible programmer i moved to canada at eight i wasn't a math whiz i didn't build an app by age six they even put me in special ed my first job was a paper route when i was 12 years old and i continued to do random jobs up until university i started programming to get a stable job coding was just a means to an end big tech companies were a dream but not one i'd ever take seriously or so i thought i applied to a university called waterloo because it had co-op and i needed help paying for school the money i raised in all of those previous jobs lasted me less than one full term waterloo was a scary place everybody already knew how to code people were using words i'd never even heard before garbage collector i thought that was a government job what the hell does i have to do with java also what the hell is java the first term was super rough i had no confidence i really believed i was going to drop out this was a place for smart people not for me the intro to computer science class consumed my life we programmed in something called racket a functional language used for teaching recursion also recursion how is your professor going to teach recursion by googling it and then clicking did you mean recursion on repeat the worst part about that is it's actually not a bad explanation in retrospect there were so many deadlines that caught me off guard that i was struggling to submit anything before the deadline never mind the correct answers after my first term i went home and i told my parents to expect that i failed at least one course but probably more to my surprise i got high 60s to low 70s in most of my courses it was just enough to keep me in the co-op program the co-op program if your imposter syndrome wasn't bad enough this is when it really kicks into drive these prodigy kids are securing google and facebook offers and they won't shut up about it on linkedin meanwhile i didn't even bother to apply to these jobs why because i didn't know how to program i knew racket what the is racket i took a job at a company called maple leaf foods the most canadian company i could find it was it support i helped people fix their windows computers now remember that because it's going to come in handy later while i was there i noticed there were some basic commands that were done repeatedly so instead of doing it one day i went to a coffee shop i bought an intro to python course i googled the hell out of everything and i created a python program that would do these tasks for us it was a cool initiative but don't get it twisted it wasn't some big program it basically just parsed a csv file and ran a for loop for that effort i was given the highest rating of any previous co-op at maple leaf foods lesson number one always look for opportunity instead of sulking now fast forward to second year i'm still feeling pretty bad about the whole program my friends are coming back and they have awesome stories about cool internships and co-ops and i fixed a few computers and wrote 46 lines of python including comments this is when i took object oriented programming thank the good lord this is actually what programming is i can now apply to real chocolate wait this is hard too object-oriented programming is where i learned about inheritance polymorphism all of those things that make you a real programmer lesson two learn how you learn this is when i learned the best studying method for me teaching as i learned a concept i would go to an empty classroom after dark and teach it to an empty classroom yeah actually this led me to my second co-op i'm not going to say the company's name because i don't have anything good to say about them but you can find them on my linkedin if you really cared this company was the worst they'd yell at me almost every day they'd blame me for things i never touched they'd keep me until after midnight some days and going home at 8 pm was a treat okay so this is my lowest point i i promise it gets better from here in third year i figured well if i was going to drop out it probably would have happened by now this is where i start to feel more confident because i figured out university lesson three figure out university i no longer rush to finish assignments last second i start assignments the second they come out and i usually finish two days before now i have more than enough time to go to office hours or ask tas if i really get stuck i no longer struggle to learn concepts some indian guy on youtube teaches me and then i teach an empty classroom lesson number four sometimes the interview doesn't go well don't take it personally i had an interview at yahoo that i really wanted because i really wanted to work in california but they rejected me because i couldn't do elite code 6 the zigzag problem to this day i cannot do this problem i'm 25 years old i work at a major tech company i've had multiple friends try to explain it to me and it's lead code medium so i didn't get the job at yahoo i landed a job at toast no not that toast this toast you may have heard of it but back in 2017 it was still a startup post is where i really learned how to be a software engineer toast makes restaurant software point of sale systems and i worked on their online ordering team which essentially saved them during the pandemic they treated me like a normal employee i had to take a problem to idea to solution and deployment i learned what front end and back and frameworks are i finally developed professionally in java and javascript and i learned they are nothing alike and horribly named i learned about the ci pipeline and agile and all those other buzz words i'd heard back and first here lesson number four slow down this isn't a race test it then test it again then again then again there were plenty of times where i had a pr with 50 plus comments on it or i merged my code and i had to revert it multiple times i was embarrassed about my skill as if i'd shown my hand and people saw i was bluffing i toast that time constraint was in my own head they just wanted the coat to work i was trying to prove i was a worthy hire and pump out as much productivity as i could but i was doing sloppy work as a result i often missed details in the spec or i didn't fully test my code when my boss pointed that out to me it was actually kind of freeing and it resulted in me doing much better work overall it wasn't for toast i probably would have quit the game but to my surprise they also gave me the highest rating lesson number five your life isn't over you'll get another shot remember back when i failed that interview yahoo well i got another one and this time i had easier problems so i got the job i worked with this other intern named sahir now remember that because it's going to come in handy later i wrote all of the functionality for this search bar in the new and improved yahoo mail you probably haven't seen it because you use gmail i i know me too i paid 12.50 a month for the dirtiest housing i've ever lived in and i had cockroaches lesson 5.5 cali is expensive and has cockroaches damn what an l moving on lesson number six do the research yourself at yahoo there were plenty of times i asked questions i didn't have to most of the tasks that you need to do are already documented in your company's wiki if you want to for example create a new deployment pipeline ask your team for a link to the company wiki and then just do a search for it you'll most likely come up with the answer and if you don't it's a fair game to ask and once you ask just write that document so the next person doesn't have to ask so after yahoo i had one last internship i wanted to travel so i went back to toast but i went to their dublin office now since i was originally from ireland i didn't need any visa or anything like that i was one year away from graduating when i got a text message from sahir back from yahoo he texted me i just got a full-time job offer at microsoft wait microsoft this whole time i thought i wasn't smart enough to work at microsoft but i worked with sawyer he's a smart guy but he had the same job if he can get that job surely i can get it too right i applied and i got the interview they wanted to fly me up to seattle but my current job didn't want me to go lesson number seven take a chance on yourself i made the executive decision to go anyway and burn that bridget toast it was a hard decision to make because i still love and respect the company but i had to do what was right for me and honestly most of my colleagues thought i was doing the right thing i remember on the plane thinking if i fail this interview i have nothing no pressure lesson number eight it's all relative this whole time at waterloo i felt as if i was below the bar everybody else was smarter than me i was always the dumbest person in the room at the microsoft interview most people had one intern experience and i had six it was the first time i realized that everything's relative sure i was below average at waterloo but i was above average countrywide the interviews all went well except for one and i landed the job now remember back to that first internship where i was helping people fix their windows computers now i'm literally coding windows all in the span of four years lesson number nine don't be an elephant wait let me explain you know they can tie elephants down with a small stick and a piece of rope surely the elephant can pull this out of the ground why don't they just walk away when the elephant is young they tie it up securely it learns it isn't strong enough to escape even when it turns into a four ton behemoth doesn't realize it doesn't even try to escape anymore the restraint in this case was my limiting beliefs microsoft was ecstatic to hire me but if it wasn't for saw here i wouldn't have even applied so know this you won't be able to immediately pull the stick out of the ground but you will get there if you aren't the smartest person in the room you're doing something right and if you are the smartest person in the room find a different room we created these resume templates that went viral on linkedin a facebook resume that looks like a facebook feed a google resume that looks like google search we drafted up resumes like this for all the big tech companies and we're giving them away for free we've got plenty of recruiters reaching out to us telling us how cool these things look we're giving these resume templates away to anyone who subscribes and likes the video then you can just go to hiredfortech.com and enter your email voila we'll send it to you the earlier you sign up the better because we're sending these out in waves and less people that have them the more unique they are i'll see in the next video

Channel: Jason Goodison

Views: 1,071,841

Keywords: software engineering, software engineer, work from home, wfh, women in tech, microsoft, day in my life, interview prep, data structures and algorithms, java, kotlin, technical skillls, coding prep, learn to code, computer science degree, self-taught programmer, i'm bad at coding, i suck at coding, i'm bad at programming, faang, big tech, meta, facebook, amazon, square, growth mindset, fixed mindset, internship, cs internship, coding, computer science

Id: fehAgOqTR44

Length: 9min 19sec (559 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 02 2022