Lawyer to a Software Engineer At Google

do you want to build a career in it by learning how to code but you are full of self doubts because you have spent many years in a different industry today's video is going to be very inspirational for you we are talking with zubeen who spent 12 years as a lawyer in his professional career at the age of 37 he started learning how to code and within two years he got a job at google as a software engineer zubin also runs an awesome youtube channel where he puts content that can help you make this transition the link of the channel is is in video description below so make sure you subscribe to it and let's get started and learn from zubin's journey all right zubin uh thanks for spending time for this conversation today pleasure double thank you for having me on the channel yeah so what do you do at google right now just talk about the team that you work with some of the programming languages and tools that you use at google sure um so i mean google's a very large company as everyone knows and even the engineering teams can be quite big so i'm now part of the uh chrome os team the chrome operating system team which is you know most of it is open source stuff available for the public to look at and this is not really the browser a bit so much though it is sort of related to that this is more about the operating system for chromebooks and other devices so it's a really interesting space because obviously it's a different way of trying to approach the web um and in that space i'm in the engineering productivity team i write a lot of goal line code um you know and other internal set of tools that i use um and my role is really to ensure that we write automations and other frameworks and things that assist uh other developers and be productive that improves the performance in our ci cd and so on and so forth so it's quite an interesting space i'm relatively new to this team i was in google cloud before this but that's what i do right now nice go language i heard is becoming very very popular so i'm glad that you're working in that language let's discuss about you uh your past uh your education uh your career as a lawyer and what sparked the idea of making a career in coding right well this is a long story but i'll try and make it short okay so it um i never actually intended to take on a career in coding what happened was um i grew up in the 90s in india and i went to law school there in bangalore and then um you know this was 98 when i entered law school 2003 it was a five-year program i finished and double you'll remember the entire world changed in that period right i mean google came out of a stanford research lab sort of thing in 98 or whatever it was and then by 2003 2004 got listed in the in between that period there was a dot-com boom the dot com crash so back then the internet was still a relatively unknown quantity um and i was on a very traditional path to be a lawyer and all that so i started that way and then i was a lawyer in india for a while and moved to australia where i'm based now um and in that entire period the more senior i got at the law the better i got it the more i realized i really enjoyed the people it was intellectually very challenging but i wanted to do more i was very curious um come 2007 2008 you know that global financial crisis happened and it is a very difficult time for people around the world i'm sure you you know if you were in the us at that point of time i'm sure you would have had a challenging time too and so i was in a situation where i was thinking gosh i'm going to hold on to my job am i not going to hold on to my job but i also realized at that point in time as much as i enjoyed being a lawyer i really was quite interested in the business side of things especially technology and business and from then on 2009 10 onwards my interest in tech started but my interest in business also started to grow and so i went on this long journey of trying to change out of the law which is quite hard that was my first career change trying to change out of the law um eventually did that 2014 2015. by this time i tried to i'd hired a bunch of developers overseas including in india and stuff to build little apps that i thought may become my startup and to be honest i knew so little that almost all the code that i ever paid for and got is still sitting in zip files on my computer and my hard disk at home because um i didn't know how to deploy them like i didn't know anything i knew nothing about technology you know but i started to feel really left out level i was starting to feel like there's this you know there's been a decade of momentum with this incredibly exciting creative um space and it wasn't just that it was lucrative it was actually exciting all the fun people seem to be there i honestly felt like you know i was standing on the shore and this this cruise ship filled with really fun people who were having a party and enjoy themselves you know floating away from me it was it was a very difficult time because i'm like i should be grateful for this career and success i've had and i was doing quite well and you know being paid quite well and all that i'm like why do i want to be on that boat you know why does it feel like the distance between me and that cruise ship is expanding every day so you know all that was going through my mind anyway i you know ended up just quite um yeah i ended up moving into the business side of the company i was in so i went from a law firm to a company as a lawyer then within the company after many years of trying i found a role that was not legal and that was my first step in the meanwhile i tried to teach myself to go two or three times and gave up during that period because it was just too hard and i didn't know what i was doing um in hindsight it was my lack of a plan which i didn't know how to have and then eventually um in fact a few days after i got married i called with my wife at work and i said um listen like we need to talk and you know i'm going to quit my job right and uh i i just want to do something something else five days after marriage that's courageous it was very courageous there was also you know kudos to my wife she was very stable about it and she said okay good well this is what you always wanted for a long time just go ahead and do it you know but i was kind of nervous i'm like maybe i should have said this before the actual wedding but anyway that's what happened um you know and so we left so i left the company i was in and i started this tech company i was non-technical i had no idea what i was doing i sent a lot of my savings into building up the product and you know getting several thousand users on it over the next few years it was a parking application and then i finally found someone after great difficulty to become my tech co-founder but then he left after six months of personal family reasons and i was left you know there with these proof of concept contracts that i had to deliver on and not being technical and all that and then i just said well i've had enough i've you know i'm so tired it's so hard to find a technical co-founder for a non-technical person i said i'm just gonna learn to go like for a decade now i was sitting on the fence watching the cruise line and drift away and thinking i'll never be part of this and so i said i've had enough i've left my job the worst has happened rather than going back i'm just going to keep going forward in this direction right and so i did that i taught myself to god it wasn't easy i just did i learned from my mistakes this was my fourth attempt um and the goal was and i wrote a blog about this on free code cam the goal of this was to become my own technical co-founder that was my goal if i ever started another company again i don't want to be at someone else's mercy right that's how it started i did that and five six months later i was like okay i'm getting comfortable with the idea of code now it's mainly front end a little bit of back end and i was like okay i'm getting some sort of web development skill here what am i going to do this now i don't really have a business idea yet so i said okay the best thing for me to do is to try and get paid to learn um which means i you know get good enough to get a job even if it's a junior development rebooting my career from the ground up like i was 37 when i got myself to code 38 i got my first job and i got all four offers that i applied for to be honest that's not because i was particularly great it's because i've hired and been hired i've been both the candidate and the hiring side in three industries and four countries right so i have experiences that has nothing to do with just engineering that's just how the labor marketplace works so i leveraged all that knowledge got all four offers chose one and um got my first start as a web developer a full stack web developer here in australia and a year later i decided okay i'm going to go first of a big i'm gonna go um for google because my wife and i thought you know this is free pandemic let's go to california and see what that's like and then i got into google you know about a year after that um and that's where i've been ever since the last little over a year almost a year and a half now so that's the full story it was never intentional to be a career coder um and to be honest i probably will go back to startup either my own or you know try and co-found something at some point in time i'm really interested in that um but i do enjoy the process of being a developer it's extremely creative it's challenging but uh you know i'm finally on the party board it took me a long time to swim and close that gap and it was hard but i'm finally on it you know you're on the cruise finally finally cruise boat finally nice well congratulations on success on your success so it's quite quite interesting right like 37 you start learning coding and you must have faced a lot of social pressure i believe other than social pressure i think a lot of self doubts as well correct so how do you deal with all of that um look i'll answer the social pressure one really there are two categories of social pressure that people end up caring about and myself included one is people who love you who like what are you doing you're crazy and then there's others also people who love you like we support you we love you we'll get behind you but you're crazy you know so either way most people are like you're crazy um and then there's all the other pressure which is not so much from people that you love but just you know anytime you you have a career and you're leaving it especially if you've been successful in it everybody else will just look at you funny or even if they don't even if they're actually looking at you admiringly you perceive that as some sort of judgment on their part and you feel smaller i was 37 a lot of my colleagues by that time you know while high income earning you know lawyers of you know sort of executive type people and i'd given up that life to do this and i'd gone back no income from my startup for two and a half years and then when i was junior web developer my income was like 30 of what i was earning before that you know so a lot of it was my own psychology to be honest but looking back i realized i was the big problem there most people while they thought i was crazy and they wouldn't want to do it but somewhere they also kind of admired the fact that you know i was going for what i wanted and i was taking risks and now of course there was like this is amazing what you've done but really it i honestly genuinely believe anyone can do it um the big obstacle is as you mentioned self-doubt and on the self-doubt part devil i don't know i think anybody who's basically interested in learning will never get rid of self-doubt because what happens is the more you learn the more you realize how much you don't know and how much there is to know right it's people who are totally confident about themselves with no reservations with no sense of imposter syndrome they're usually people who don't really know how much there is to know you know um and i think if you're a curious learner you'll always have that self doubt about my god am i ever going to be able to know what i need to know but the good thing is you learn faster than you realize um and you know over time you just get you learn to live with the self-doubt it's like having a shadow you stop paying attention to it so much got it and other than self-doubts uh what were the problems that you you faced uh during this career transition yeah um specifically about the learning to code you mean about the general career transition itself generally including learning to code including learning okay i'll start with the learning to code stuff because i think a lot of people feel this i think a lot of people and just last night i was having a coaching conversation with someone about this i think a lot of people that will think that um if it's hard that means it's either i'm not smart enough or the resource i'm using is not good enough as opposed to it's just hard um and there's a certain amount of paid work and digging that you have to do to get to the breakthrough anyway you know um so that that was definitely a mistake i felt do i either discounted myself or disqualified myself but thought i just wasn't smart enough because you know there's always mythology around coding right or you have to be a math genius you have to be some sort of you know nerding genius or whatever it is it's not really true there are people like that but a lot of people can be really good coders they're being regular people you know it's not it's not like that yeah yeah it's i think it's a big misconception i math you need if you're a machine learning engineer or some specific role but other i think 90 percent 1995 of software engineers you don't need to be smart in math right and i think because of that a lot of people discount themselves you know and as you said you may need it for specific roles and i would argue even then it's learnable like after joining google i had to learn a bunch of new schools i'm still learning a bunch of new skills that i never would have had to learn outside a company of this size or scale right um and had i thought gosh i don't know that how can i even try you know i mean people expect you to learn on the job and especially in this field whether you're doing it professionally or not things move so fast there's always a new exciting technology to work with and there's always a learning curve which i personally love right because i think any other role you'll end up stagnating but less on this so i think this thing about you know these myths that make us discount ourselves that was one obstacle i faced the other obstacle i faced is i'd constantly switch because i didn't know which resources was right for me and i always assumed if i was having difficulty it's the resource um all my my problem never that some things are hard like i mentioned so that was the second thing i uh realized i was doing wrong the third thing i i did was which was very difficult for me was you know you don't know where to start you don't know how much is enough you don't really have a path to your goal you just know you want to become a coder but the thing is it's not like walking you know when you see a child learning to walk one moment it's not working the next moment you know it's walking and it's clear there's a line between not walking and walking i don't know if there's a line between becoming a coder and not being a coder like it's very clear when someone cannot code but at what point do you say become a coder you know if you feel like you know what i mean and so i always set that goal post beyond where it was necessary you know and so i never felt like i was reaching it so that was another mistake i made um and finally on the coding side you know not understanding that everybody has an opinion and everybody's opinion is based on their life choices and therefore they will fight really hard to defend that opinion and tell you you're wrong which is a human nature thing that caused a lot of confusion in me because any time i made a choice there were 100 people telling me it was a rubbish choice and you know 100 people telling me it was the correct choice for me that's really confusing and overwhelming and because of this free information that we have on the internet we have a tendency of assuming that the abundance of information is an asset i truly believe having it's free information is an asset no question about it but having that level of abundant information without real strict guidelines about what you can and cannot ignore is a recipe for being overwhelmed completely overwhelmed and confused and that's how i spent four years of trying to learn to go right like there were four attempts it was my fourth attempt that i succeeded and the fourth attempt once i figured out my blueprint um it took me a little over five and a half maybe six months to get to my first role right so i really think it's possible for people to do it if they're working full-time within a year with real discipline you can totally do it but the trick is to know that you have to ignore most of the nonsense advice out there you know so that's on the coding side and on the career change side most people will tell you it's possible and you know you can do it especially even if you're speaking to professional colleagues about you know i'd like to join your team but i don't have direct experience most people say yeah you're smart you can do it and all the rest of that but when it actually comes time to giving you the role they may not do it right and this is a number of reasons one is hr may have rules about it there's you know candidates in the market that are less risky and this is why i say that career changes is less about the subject matter sometimes and more about understanding how the market works and so you have to work to de-risk yourself as a candidate you have to work to understand that given role what problem the hiring manager is facing um and how you can be the best solution for it on the day right and really i know people especially you know in the in the knowledge working space we love to think that we are the cause of successful outcomes you know i got in because i was smart i did this because i was capable because i worked hard all of these things are necessary but they're not sufficient there's a little bit of magic in life right there's a little bit of magic and that's a little bit of luck on the day you interview for the role you got lucky that other candidates weren't better than you that day follow that day not that the better people not that they're better coders we don't know any of that those are useless comparisons all right you know and we know this in athletics like there were times when sachin tendulkar had a bad day you know yes there were times when michael jordan had a bad day when other people beat these people yes but we don't deny that their ability and that's exactly what getting a job career change no matter which field you're in there's a little bit of luck and magic in life and so being hard working and smart is necessary but not sufficient but a lot of people assume it's efficient and then get disappointed when life gets in the way or they had a bit of bad luck when you think about it any interview is statistically set up for failure everybody except one is going to lose yes right it's simple stats no matter how good you are and well i agree with all your points and i know many many many cricket matches where where sachin tend to go got out on a first ball right doesn't mean he's a bad player unskilled player yeah yeah so talking about the problems that you face do you think if you had a good mentor that would have helped that's actually what resulted in my breakthrough at the end so it is a combination of mentorship it was a combination of mentorship persistence and getting the right guidance and clarity are my goals right so i'll give you an example the first time i tried to learn to code i wanted to do an android app i went straight into the android framework not even knowing the difference between a framework and a language not even knowing what an id was not even knowing what compiling code meant um so having a mentor will really help because a good mentor will tell you that's not where you start in fact what is your goal right so another example of one of the students i was coaching you'll appreciate that i've given you a background was two months into learning python and she abandoned it right to go and start learning c because everyone told her yeah but you're really not she wanted to be a data scientist and machine learning engineer that was a path right she was clear on that goal which is good but she ended up giving up on pi at the two months and she was so close to making that breakthrough she gave it give up on it and switch to c because everyone is telling her to be a really serious computer science sort of person are taken really seriously you have to know see because that's what python's implemented in this and that right and it sounded persuasive because everybody wants to be the best you know everyone wants to try and be excellent of what they do and she gave it up went into she found it really complicated in some senses it set her back not just time wise but psychologically it cost her about two to three months and i told her i said in that time had you persisted with python you got your certifications and you would have possibly been ready for your first role you could have picked up see later once you had the confidence you know so i think that that's actually quite definitely what happens very often is you know we without the right mentorship and guidance we make choices based on incomplete information we just don't have the map to make the navigation and so yeah the best we can you know we do the best we can but often you know direction is more important than speed right so even if i take the best judgment and i go in the wrong direction if i want to go from bombay to calcutta but i head west i will not get there exactly and it has become very important in today's age where there are so many e-learning websites so many blogs so many bootcamps if you want to learn python there are million places you can learn python from so more choices more confusion so if anyone so much confusion so if someone who is listening to this conversation right now wants to make a transition make sure you get a good mentor and it's not hard to find one linkedin internet you will find so many good mentors and just follow the direction have patience it's like you know i want to build muscles and i just go to one gym for one week then another gym for one week and don't have patience it doesn't work like that exactly no that's 100 that's a great example you know to switch gyms it doesn't work you know and the other thing i really want people in the channel to remember this the risk is not that you won't be able to learn it or you're not smart enough or that it's too hard the risk is that you will make it inadvertently without meaning you will make it so hard for yourself that you'll give up your real risk is giving up not that the subject is hard right so anything you can do to compress the time frame to learning while at the same time not having too many distractions pull you and confuse you is not really making you better at learning directly but indirectly it's reducing your risk of giving up therefore making you better at learning exactly i think that's the most important thing that you mentioned and the girl that you talked about right when you person when a person goes from python to c you're setting up yourself for a failure because c is much harder compared to python okay and not necessary for the goal you know why would we do it just because it's nice to have when our goal doesn't require it yet you know it's so much more important to get paid to learn the harder goals like get to put your goals smaller make it more achievable once you're in the industry you can learn many more things on top of that you'll have the confidence you'll have the support all of that will come to you yep you said it very right you need to plan things such as that such way that you can reduce the probability of you giving up i think that's the most important biggest risk all right so just to revise your own career journey you were a lawyer for 12 years you started these companies you know you you were involved with some startups in tech industry that's how you kind of got involved into this beautiful world you know of coding and technology companies and so on and then you started learning coding so you didn't you didn't go from lawyer to software engineer at google but it was like a step-by-step transition and it was not something you aim for but you know there's a saying that life is what happens when you are busy planning other things right so that's what happened with you all right so let's go back a little bit into your own journey and discuss about your interview process at google so how was the interview process and most importantly what was the feedback from your family and friends when you when you got an offer from google right so the i mean the interview process uh double is you know quite public it's well known basically it is you apply you get um you know phone screen and then a technical interview on the phone um and then you have your you know on-site so your interview now i started interviewing for amazon and google and snap and all these other companies in the us around the same time between january and march and if you remember this is sorry 2020 right and so if you remember covet had started but no one really knew what it was all about and so by march it was very clear that none of the interviews were going to be on site they were all starting to be virtual in any way and so that's how it happened and that was quite hard because you know some of them are in strange time zones and all the rest of that and you know especially the more technical you know algorithms and data structures interviews where you know you have 45 minutes to one hour and you're doing it online and you can hear them breathing on the mic and things like that like they make it very comfortable all of them do um so that was the google interview process as well it was several hours back-to-back um and it was you know challenging like you'd expect um but you know i prepared and i also knew as you know um you and i have talked about this that you know there comes a certain point in your life when you're not too attached to the outcome because you realize there's a bit of magic in this as well you know so i done my best i was happy with it i whether i got in or not you know everything was going to be a bonus but the very fact that i got that far was good enough for me for all these companies uh considering ourselves so that was the interview process when i got it and i had a couple of offers and i was you know for me google was always going to be the clear winner because i've had such a long fascination for and respect for the company for me you know it was it was a great company and an opportunity at first people are like so oh you're going back to the law or because i had an mba the default thing is so great you know so is it a product role or what i'm like no it's an engineering role um and they're like like writing code and i'm like yeah and they're like but didn't you just start writing code i'm like no it's been you know a year and a half or two years or something you know so there was this confusion and then people like how is that possible and i'm like it's possible other people have done it why not me you know there's there's no difference you're all human being so that was that to be honest there was a moment i i'm slightly ashamed to say it but i was actually secretly quite kicked and it's quite vindicated by the end because a lot of the doubting people are like hang on what that that's possible that was great it felt good i'll be honest it felt good and you mentioned that many people have done this so in in your life have you come across people from a different background who have switched to you know coding career yeah because i think um what ends up happening is once you do it suddenly you encounter more people that they recharge or in my case when i wrote that blog on free code cam um a lot of people you know just reached out on the back of that saying hey you know i used to be a lawyer too um even in melbourne you know and i've gone into the development world um there isn't one another ex lawyer at google who's a software engineer but he went by the boot camp you know and so you meet people from you know i've met people from investment banking um in fact i know now just directly myself in the last year i've met 16 people around the world one six who are ex-lawyers turn quotas right um so once it becomes more normalized in that sense people come out you know they self-identify and say hey you know i'm also from a non-traditional background and slowly you realize that it's much more prevalent and possible than you realize it's not easy but you know the world's a big place and it's possible right because uh my friend's wife goes for one of such boot camp here in delaware state in u.s and if she has a class of i think 20 to 30 people and everyone is from a very different background there are people who are chefs you know like chefs like cooking and so such a diverse background and after finishing that boot camp everyone got a job so every one of them are working as a programmer so programming is not like being a doctor so if you want to become a doctor you have to go to a lab you have to dissect human body you can't do it at your home but programming is the entry barrier is very less you need you need internet laptop all the resources are there available for free just just um yeah and you know the big thing with these practices double is i mean because i was a lawyer you know you have to be admitted so you know when i moved to australia as a lawyer i had to requalify in some senses get re-licensed and admitted right and you have to maintain that every year the same thing in india us or whatever it is in the us it's even more uh difficult because every state has its own bar association so same thing medicine and accounting right so these are gated professions you know they have a central body that tells you whether you can practice or not you know so they get it and so you need licenses and formal degrees and all that but most most of the world's professions don't require that they're not gated in that sense and especially engineering which i think is truly background blind um you know it's funny so five years ago i remember asking people in i think this is a twitter survey somewhere else you know do you think computer science as a background is really really important um and a lot of people i think 40 of people said yes recently i did one again on the google sheets for my communities i have a very small community a few hundred people um and only one percent i think said they thought it was still important in five years that shift has happened you know people are starting to realize that having a formal computer science background while useful is not necessarily or sufficient anywhere um and you can pick that up so you know slowly people are realizing that having a non-traditional background it's not the background that's the challenge it's being able to learn in a way that's able to efficiently get you to your goals it's really not the background people tend to think it's the background it's a challenge for getting your first job because you have no industry experience that's true but learning to code doesn't care about your background because everybody had to start from zero everybody without an exception got it and while listening to this conversation i know what people would be thinking who are listening especially if the people are listening from some of the asian countries you know india pakistan bangladesh uh because i this i get this question a lot that okay things are very different in developed nations such as u.s australia so it's easy to make that career transition but if you're in india let's say it's not easy but i want to tell to those folks that in india also things are changing very very fast you know india is evolving rapidly i know every country has their own mindset culture people think differently but that trend is changing very rapidly so nowadays doesn't matter if you're in u.s or australia or india you can make that career transition and it is possible you have to just you need to have that faith because if you go and see seek the social approval from your friends and relatives you will only get disappointment okay so don't look for that social approval just have that faith and a hope and you will you will and you said it right like once you get some success all of a sudden you find so many people who have already you know walked the talk a lot of the people who you know said yeah i think you can do it and yeah sure try but you could see the doubt in their eyes a lot of them will come to you and say i had no doubt you could do it you know of course especially aunties and uncles and stuff will say that right these anchors are worse like my brother my brother is a computer engineer he started his own business okay everyone filled him with so much doubts everyone was telling me no you're not doing the right thing because he started this uh software training business and it was like four or five years he was not making any money he got married which makes things worse and people were like oh yeah look at this guy you know he got married he's not even earning bread and butter he's relying on his father and everyone just tortured him left and right now now my brother is successful he's he's having a software company 60 people work in his company growing very rapidly and the same people are coming to him and then you know what they're telling oh parveen you know we knew you will be successful because you are good in communication you are so smart and all that it might find the reason my brother was talking to me see look at these jokers you know the the the world is full of clowns you know they make a happy face they make like a crying face they just change in every second that's so true can i ask double so your brother's business how long has it been now since he started it so he started actually it's been uh six to seven years i think seven years now so he ran a training institute for three years then he realized okay he should be building a software development company so he shut down the whole training institute he's one of those people you know who who is a risk taker who can go against what the society is saying but not everyone is that courageous you know so he built a the software training business he worked hard for three years and he took the business to a level where the business was profitable and now he's shutting down the whole business and again he faces a lot of social pressure because everyone is like are you full like you have a running business and you're shutting it down you're doing just totally new thing and you're not sure whether you'll be successful some people always advise you what you did yeah some people advise either continue doing that or don't shut it down do the other thing in parallel and when the other thing stabilizes shut down this business but he was more like you know no i i'm confident the other thing will work and if i want to focus on that i need to shut down this thing you know which is consuming a lot of my time so then he started this company called athletic technologies in 2017 that company grows very fast like four years he has 60 people he's hiring 50 more people can you believe it like 100 he's going to be 110 people he's doubling right now wow and everyone comes to him the same same people comes to empower you are such a such as you are very genius we knew you were you will be very successful so if anyone is listening to this conversation the the world is full of clowns you know like if it's so it's up to you whom you want to listen to totally all right and you know what double just on that point like i think this is a there's a big lesson in your brother's journey right first he spent he had to overcome self-doubt even if he's a natural risk taker nobody is immune from doubt fear and usually courage is manifested only in the face of care like if you're not afraid there's no courage like there's no need for it right right so to have courage you need to be facing fear you need to be feeling fear then you overcome the doubt then you overcome the social resistance then most people will tell you at some party or dinner or breakfast or whatever or you're crazy why are you doing this you should be doing this and they'll go in they'll forget about your life they're not thinking about you you are living in either the joy or the hell of where you are you're either in heaven or hell on these journeys one of the two positions right and you have to live with that every minute of every day for years with no success for the first few years then you get some success then you have to then he realizes that i won't actually there's actually another opportunity here and this is the important part i think in this whole story of your brother is he realized that he couldn't do two things at the same time and do them well he had to make a choice of where to put his focus right and this is so important i hope everyone in your channel hears this there are so many distractions there are so many shiny new technologies there are so many opportunities that are going to try and compete for your attention when you're in a down place they will all look incredibly easy sweet attractive and guaranteed but this is the only thing that's guaranteed if you switch once you will make a habit of switching and then you will spend time on the other thing and realize that is also hard it's got its own set of challenges you keep moving between stools and never sit on any other right yep and then you will spend three years not having done anything feeling bad about yourself learning a little bit of everything but not enough to be good at anything and that's when you will give up it's much better to be really good at one thing than to be really bad at many things and give up one another over the other you know so i i think your brother's journey there is a direct metaphor for almost anything in life but definitely in the coding journey like so many people getting distracted should i do react or view should i do django should i do cloud when you're learning learn the fundamentals they're more or less the same regardless of which language my first language was javascript it took me two and a half three months to get comfortable with it my second language was i mean whether it's considered a language or not it was different type script but it had a whole different set of rules that took me two weeks and i was able to pick up the basics and get effective and productive in grow line in one week wow because i'm not and i'm not great at gold line just to be clear i was able to get productive the reason is i had solid foundations in one language even if it wasn't a strong leader whatever that you can get into the technical stuff right the 80 percent of what you need to know is common across all of them so if you're better off focusing on one that is quick for you to eat and easy and something that you can actually be productive with everything else gets easier after that you know switching focus is very dangerous very very dangerous and it becomes a habit totally agree now if someone wants to make a career change transition you know like how you did what are the first three steps that you advise that that person should take right so the first three steps is um let me give an example of uh let's say you want to buy an ice cream it's the same problem solving process first you have to decide it's not just i want ice cream you have to sort of know what kind of flavor you like or at least what flavors you don't like so to draw that back to the career change thing it's not really enough to say i wanted to change my career because at that point at a time the only information you have is i don't want to do this career so you've eliminated one right hopefully and then now you have to choose something else now let's take coding if you want to switch to coding there are so many different types of coding and you don't have to become a professional software engineer right you don't even have to become a professional developer front end you can be you know a data science person and we can get into the differences of all these things or you can be technical enough to be in a quality assurance or product management anything that's your first step that's directionally where you want to go so you choose the flavor you want that you think is interesting enough and exciting now for you that will keep you motivated on the down days because most of the days will be down days so you choose your flavor then you choose okay how much do i really want it because i have to pay a price if you want um if you don't have the the time or the patience or the grit to pay that price you will damage your self-esteem by trying for something you're not serious about it you know you you will so that's the second thing is you you decide how much do i want and if the price of this is it takes me two years i'm going to do it right so that's the second thing you decide the price and the third thing is you ask people who had ice cream before where you get the best one do not ask people who've never eaten ice cream which ice cream should i have you know it makes no sense right so that means if you're looking for a career change not only do you need to speak to the people who are already doing the kind of thing you want to do you also need to try and find people who've changed career they're two very different skills so i mean right i may go to a software engineer who's never changed korea and they will quite rationally tell me you're crazy don't change your career after 10 years or 15 years because maybe they don't like their career they hate being an id and they're going to tell you it's horrible and so bordering and all the lessons and you're a career changer you're crazy that's possible go to an i.t person and say what is it like to do this job that you are doing tell me what the content of the college you know so you understand right because most people confuse the company for the job and i keep saying this i said this on twitter linkedin what you do every day is much more important for your mental well-being than who pays you to do it the job is much more important than the company that you're doing it for so you know do the due diligence and the kind of job you want then the other thing is the career change aspect the only people who tell you it's possible are people who've done it yes you want to change great speak to people who've changed careers and if you want to get into it speak to people who change careers and then have a separate market of people who are in iit if you can find someone who's done both even better yes but if you can't find people who've done both separate the buckets out don't mix up the two because you'll get different kinds of information from different people and that's the third ingredient right is only ask for ice cream recommendations from people who've eaten ice cream at the shop you want to buy it from i like your ice cream analogy it's common sense when you think about it for small things like that but in big career decisions we make we confuse the problem solving process so that goes into basically picking up your mentor so you need to you don't just pick any mentor but a mentor who has done that transition who is also empath you know who has a lot of empathy and who is compassionate who wants to help people so choosing mentor like you you need to be very careful otherwise people will put all kind of negativity in your head and you know it's not going to be helpful you know the point of negativity is really good and someone asked me once you know if you've never seen a sheep before and i told you a sheep is a vicious animal that will kill you the first time you see a sheep you'll be a little bit scared of it right yeah his point was we take people so literally when they give us advice we have to ask ourselves do they really know what they're talking about yes you know because if somebody tells your sheep is a dangerous vicious animal it'll rip your throat out it's just not true yes but we take it at face value because we've never seen a sheep before you know right all right so for going back to the questions if the person is wants to make a transition maybe i can add my own thoughts here so first is choosing a mentor of course if the world is like full of information you want to determine the path and i have by the way i i also make some videos on this front so if you want to become a data analyst data scientist what is the direction you should take what are the courses you should do in a step-by-step manner so i have those videos so you can go find those videos on youtube uh find the right mentor like subin for example he has done this career transition and they're going to provide his linkedin as well i can connect with him uh or any other person you know who has made this transition and the third thing is which which is what we mentioned during the beginning of the conversation is you need to have patience you know things are not going to happen magically like it's not like you will become python expert in first month learning programming requires little bit of mindsets shift so if you're never done coding and when you start doing it for the first time you know it will it will sound alien almost and you have to adjust to that and it will take time you will have to go to a lot of frustration but but do not give up basically give enough time six months one year i think that's you agree right like that that should be the path for us to take yeah and on the thing about time though you know because so many people tend to switch courses like you know obviously you know your material i mean how i even met you is because your material is very accessible and i think everybody should find one or two people who they are able to learn from everyone's learning styles different find people that you're able to learn from and then after that stop switching just commit to finishing everything that person has to offer don't switch because every time you switch you'll just go backwards like snake and snakes and that is and understanding thing you know i think people make the mistake of saying i'm going you know it says like i bought a book one javascript and uh sorry java in learn java in 24 hours right but basically it's a textbook that's designed where every chapter is meant to be read once in one hour so technically that's right 24 hours you've read the book right but it took me much longer per chapter and i didn't know java at the end of 40 hours or whatever it is i have to actually practice it right so don't fall into this trap of it's going to take me this many number of days instead assume that if if you do two hours a day it's probably going to take you about six months to get comfortable one year to get good but you have to do two hours a day consistently consistency is way more important than the number of days totally you know you have to be super consistent it's going to take people longer than they expect longer than they hope but the breakthrough will come and when it comes you'll never be the same again your life will never be the same again now you you have a youtube channel you try to help people especially who are trying to make this career transition right so just talk talk about your channel a little bit like what is a mission and what kind of videos do you have or what kind of videos you're planning to produce sure um so i mean it's a very crowded space so i never really thought i was going to have a youtube channel or anything but what happened was when i wrote that article on free code camp about my career transition i'd said i'll give free you know half an hour coaching to people and i thought maybe 10 15 people will sign up within about 48 hours 536 people signed up right and so i was completely overwhelmed by it so i did about 80 in the last three months but what i started to realize is there was a common pattern that was coming and the pattern was really around it wasn't so much about coding per se it was about the journey of becoming or learning to code you know do i do bootcamps right not and all that so there were these meta questions that were really confusing people and so i said okay there are plenty of places where you can learn python or javascript or ceo java whatever it is there's plenty of places there's no shortage of that but in terms of actually giving you a map of mental models to break down the problem for your journey specifically for you you know the language is almost a tool or a tactic you know different jobs will require different languages or frameworks so you have to learn these things but how you go about it you know what are the pros and cons what is the what is your expectation level in terms of time and effort um you know what is and most importantly i want to be very transparent about self-doubt imposter syndrome how hard it can be how many failures there were along the way because you know it's easy to watch the social network and say oh you know mark zuckerberg hacked it in the weekend we don't know you know if that's actually what happened right and i've never been able to hack anything particularly meaningful in the weekend but maybe that's a reflection on my skill but you know a month you know i've been able to do good things right so we tend to underestimate how much or we tend to overestimate what we can do in one week and underestimate what we can do in one year so we have to play the long game so that kind of stuff is what i talked about in my channel and it is really double a way for me to address the questions of those 500 plus people and then it became 700 in a few days after that because i couldn't give them all one-on-one time i could see the common questions emerging and i said all these common questions and i'll start producing videos on them so that way i don't have to have one on time one time with them they'll get the benefit of the video so that's how it started nice you're doing amazing work so continue doing uh this amazing work uh and thank you very much for spending time today for this talk uh we're going to provide all the links uh zubin's channel linkedin everything in the video description below and if you are planning to make a career transition we both wish you all the best thank you thanks devil for the opportunity thanks very much and also it's because of people like you that i was able to make the change so thanks to people like you it's possible for people like me and i think that's something everyone should remember that you know it's possible that in one year you may be either speaking to someone like double or interviewing somebody else whatever it is it's possible for you you know because of people like double so don't forget thank you thanks for all the kind words all right bye [Music]

Channel: codebasics

Views: 9,353

Keywords: yt:cc=on, software engineer at google, faang interview preparation, faang engineer, faang software engineer, faang preparation, faang career, career transition, career transition success stories, career transition at 40, career transition ideas, google interview, google software engineer, google software engineering, life at google, google software engineer jobs, google jobs, google software engineering jobs, google faang career, google faang interview

Id: Ll1BLZBSLQ8

Length: 48min 40sec (2920 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 16 2021