Technical Interviews are Trash | I Quit my DevOps Job

hello and welcome back to my channel if you don't know me my name is sosa today i'm going to be talking about the little hiatus that i took for the last three months what i've been doing basically a little bit of ranting about the technical interview process but also hoping that i can give some advice to other people who are going through this process and kind of need some light at the end of the tunnel so if you want to hear me rant or i just want to hear about my experience please feel free to stick around my first job out of college was within and on a devops and build and release engineering team if you don't know what devops is please check out the video down below i've made a couple of videos about devops it's a really really cool field and you get to learn a lot and when you're learning it at the beginning of your career it really puts you ahead of most people because these skills are super specialized and a lot of people want to get into the field and i kind of lucked out by being able to do it straight out of college and so about a year and a half ago i realized that i don't really i didn't really like what i was doing anymore it might have just been because of my specific team and some of the priorities that we had coming down the line or whatever it may have been but i recognized about a year and a half in i don't think i want to do this anymore i think it's time for me to leave part of the reason was because you know with devops depending on your team and your company devops can mean something different and when i had first started i was doing a lot of coding and i was also doing operations work i got promoted fairly early early on and with that promotion i had to take on more operations types of responsibilities after more and more time a lot of my day was focused on doing operations type things instead of doing actual development work it became unbalanced in a way so it was a combination of that it was a combination of you know what i'm a little bit bored with what i do like i'm not being challenged as much as i could be you know operations is cool and maintaining systems is cool and all but i'm not being challenged and i know i could do more with my time and then the third thing was technical mentorship so i rave and i will still rave about my manager she is amazing but my team itself super senior people and i did get to learn from them but i didn't feel like there was enough technical mentorship for me on the team i think everybody was kind of siloed and doing their own thing and like sometimes if we would meet up virtually or whatever you know i could learn a bit from them but i guess in my particular situation i was just kind of left to do what i needed to do to get my tasks done but i was never really mentored in a way that i i felt like was would be good for my career growth yeah so i think those so those were the the three big things and the three big reasons that i really wanted to try to find another position try to find my second role and so i started this process about a year and a half ago and i'll preface this to say that i have really really bad anxiety both testing anxiety and sometimes not sometimes but like i do get social anxiety as well the testing anxiety i've had since i was in high school any type of testing situation really stresses me out that was part of the reason why i didn't really want to try to look for another job but i think when all of these kind of red flags for me were not necessarily red yeah red flags started to pop up in my day to day that's when i was like okay i kind of have to try to put this aside and go full force into looking at another opportunity so a year and a half ago i kind of started the whole process i started doing leak code everybody knows about leak code and the technical interview process i think if you don't know lee code is kind of like this online place where you can practice programming problems and a lot of the times they'll have programming problems that you will see in interviews or that you'll see at a specific company's interviews and so it can be helpful but the whole technical interview process is just i think insane having to do a leak code hard question in 45 minutes with somebody staring at you maybe or maybe not giving you hints and really not allowing you to look up resources and with you having to memorize or kind of recall all of these kind of nuanced algorithms and algorithms that you don't use on a day to day or data structures that you don't use on a day to day it makes the process extremely stressful and instead of kind of asking you or testing you on your day-to-day and what you've been doing with your experience these interviews kind of try to pull out random knowledge then you have to go and do a separate type of studying just for these interviews and now i had to kind of not only do my day-to-day job but now put in hours worth of studying in doing leak code trying to break this this feeling of anxiety that i had in trying to go through with all of these interviews started you know hearing back from people i think at the time about a year and a half ago i applied to like maybe 50 60 places heard back from like half of those people and then did phone screens for half of those half of people i went through with only a couple of them because i really didn't want to just pick just any place to work i really wanted to make sure the company that i would go to next would align with what i was looking for and so i think at the time i did maybe five or six phone interviews and failed literally every single one of them it was the most traumatizing experience and i'm sure other people can relate and thinking about it kind of like oh brings up emotions but it's um it was frustrating right like you you do all this studying and you are learning concepts that you haven't kind of thought about in years and don't use on your day-to-day job and on top of relearning all these concepts you also have to make sure that you're able to answer these questions within a 30 to 40 minute time slot with five minutes left to ask questions of your own and it gets really really really demoralizing and so after failing every single one of those phone interviews i think i got to one on site back then failed that too and so i was like you know what maybe maybe my job's not that bad like maybe i can maybe this isn't that bad i'm overreacting i make a good amount of money i can figure i can take on other projects that will maybe you know allow me to do more coding i'll figure it out i can't keep stressing out about these technical interviews they're putting me in a bad place so i dropped it i just got back to work and so within the next year though the psycho repeated itself and i found myself again doing way more operations work than i wanted to not really having much technical mentorship and just being bored all the time and not feeling challenged enough on top of that i realized on top of those other three things i also realized i work a lot better at home in my little home office that i set up for myself with my my cat babies the company that i'm at right now they're saying you know work from home until the penny is over but once the panini's over y'all got to come back to the office at least two to three days a week for most people that sounds like pretty flexible that didn't really work with me i don't really want to stay in the bay area anymore a lot of the friends that i have here have left so i've been thinking about leaving wanting to leave and because of the panini i've been like you know i'm leaving and they have every right to say like hey you guys are going to have to come back at least for 20 to 30 of the time the company has every right to say that but i feel like i have the right to be like you know what that's not really what i want on top of everything else all the other reasons that i wanted to leave this was kind of the nail in the coffin for me and i picked it up again i picked up the interview process again but this time i was a lot more i tried to be a lot more easy on myself throughout the process and recognize that you know the the technical interview process has so many faults within it and i think a lot of companies are starting to recognize that you know it's kind of crazy to ask somebody to try to do elite code hard question within 45 minutes and use that as a marker of whether or not they'll be good at the job so there have been other companies who are like you know what this doesn't really make any sense like let's try to model the interview process around what candidates actually do on their day-to-day so i tried my best to you know only apply to companies or try my best to apply to a majority of companies who were in that process of like changing the game when it comes to interviewing their candidates for these engineering jobs this time around starting in january i think i applied to maybe maybe 40 30 to 40 places i heard back from i would say about like 60 of those places and i just started doing technical phone screen after technical phone screen and i think to get me out of that place of stress it wasn't ever not stressful to to be transparent i think what i did as i said was just to give myself more grace give myself more time remember that the system itself and these processes are flawed but in order to get this job or get a job that i really want i just i just have to do it and so this is kind of just the necessary evil that comes with it so i would take like maybe two one to two hours a day after my work day to just like go through a lot of the easy questions and i think that's a good way to kind of build your momentum and build your confidence within yourself and so start with the lee code easy questions refresh your memory on some of the really common data structures like lists and trees and maps and hash tables and data structures like that then go into some of the more common patterns that you would see in these interviews and one piece of advice that i'll give you if you're currently in this process it is okay to do the brute force solution first figure out how you can solve it in the most inefficient way possible first and then you can go into figuring out how to optimize and how to make it more efficient i feel like once you get over that hurdle of not knowing how to even get to an answer once you get to the point where you have an answer it makes things much easier another thing i have to think about is what i wanted in my next position so my company that i worked at great culture great people and they pay really well and so i knew that i did not want to sacrifice those things at the next place i would go to so on top of having those three things i also wanted to make sure right like the things that i'm leaving the boredom no technical mentorship not being challenged i needed to be able to find that in the next position so just having like a real a real clear cut of what i wanted was really important that helped me kind of tailor my applications and the people that i sought out and the companies that i looked at you know the remote piece was big as well like i really wanted a company that would that is not only allowing people to be remote but that is like kind of baked into the culture or that they've embraced it and they want to find ways to make sure that remote workers are equal to people who decide to be in the office companies that had a remote first culture and values and there's not many companies who are like that that was part of the stress as well was like okay i already kind of have it's already super hard to get technical interviews to begin with right or just to be able to get through the whole process to begin with it ends up being a number game and you have to like apply to a bunch of different companies especially if you're more junior the added stress for me was like okay not only are the odds really slim of me even getting a job but the fact that i now am tailoring myself to only apply to specific jobs that only meet the specific criteria even though it's super important to me i knew that that would limit me immensely with the amount of companies that i would end up being able to get through the process with out of like the 50 applications there were like 10 companies that after you know talking to people and getting in touch with people who work there were companies that i was like okay i think all of these companies would meet my criteria which is crazy right because like people are applying to like 400 500 places and still may not end up with a job i knew my chances were super slim you know i had those companies and so i started i got to work kind of had to find ways to de-stress face the anxiety that i had in these situations also making sure to kind of stagger things so that it wasn't as consuming and overwhelming having to do five technical interviews in one week absolutely not so i just made sure to stagger them hi so i'm in the middle of editing and i realized i didn't get results for the ten companies that i was really excited about and that met my entire criteria i'm gonna do that now for the 10 companies i actually failed the phone screen for three of them and that was fine i was able to use some of the feedback that the recruiters had given me in order to kind of get better for the next interviews i had with other companies and then for the fourth company i didn't make it past the second phone screen but then i did get to on sites for six out of the ton companies so out of those six i didn't receive an offer from three of them and then i received an offer from two so for one of the companies it was actually a down level offer meaning that they would bring me in at a level lower than what i'm currently at and i didn't really want to do that so i said no and then the other offer was for an amazing company spoiler alert i took the offer um but it was for a really awesome company they actually ended up asking me to recode hards but it was it went really well i feel like i matched really well with the interviewers they were so nice and patient and it felt more conversational and that like i can could bounce ideas off of them when i felt like i was stuck or needed a hint and there was also a system design question which was really cool and then a product manager interview where we kind of like got to talk to people who were thinking about and building out the next phase of the product for users and so it would be kind of like geeked out about what was next for the platform and what was what was on their roadmap and things like that it was really cool uh and everyone i met was really amazing so that's why i took the offer and that is for a back-end engineering role so kind of pivoting out of devops and moving more into a software a pure software engineering position which i'm pretty excited about just because i get to do something a little bit different and kind of work with a different tech stack and i think i'm going to get to do a lot more coding which i'm really excited about and then the last company i actually withdrew from the onsite because felt like i didn't want to waste their time because i had already made a decision so yeah it all ended up working out i'm not going to pretend like it was easy i think this has been some of the most uh why am i so emotional about this these last three months have been so stressful i think on top of being in the middle of a panini having just the world seem like it's up in flames and then also being able to try to find a job with everything else going on it's it's a lot to have to on top of that deal with the fact that this process can be just so random like you could one day just meet an interviewer who just is not having a good day because they're human right like not all of us are going to have a good day we might not want to be there sometimes a lot of it has to do with luck when it comes to these things part of me recognized that and was just really sad all the time because i felt like my chances are so slim how am i going to get through this i have to you know keep studying i have to keep working it was really really hard at times and if you're going through this process and you're stressed out or sad or whatever i completely get it and i'm with you but you kind of just have to find those glimpses of hope or just like find ways to cope with the stress if you can talk to your family as much as you as much as you possibly can talk to family talk to friends make sure that you have some type of outlet so that this process doesn't get as overwhelming as it can be let me just say this i absolutely love what i do i love being a software engineer i feel like i lucked out being in this career and i make videos about it about how passionate i am about what i do but this field is not perfect the process to get another job in this field absolutely insane a lot of things need to change in this process and companies like stripe and a bunch of other companies are doing the work to kind of try to start that change but if you're currently in the process just know like you got this give yourself grace use those setbacks to your benefit and remember a lot of this has a lot to do with luck and there's a bunch of randomness that goes into the process but that shouldn't stop you if you just want to talk about it like or just need somebody to vent to you please reach out because i like venting with people i like ranting if you just want to talk in the comments about it do that as well because you know i like to talk in the comments but anyway i hope you know me sharing my experience with you helps just a little bit thanks for watching and sticking through this entire thing thank you for letting me vent yeah i'll see you next time

Channel: Sosa

Views: 13,024

Keywords: woman in tech, women in tech, black female engineer, software engineer, sosa, technical interviews are trash, i quit my devops job, i quit my software engineer job, technical interviews are garbage, technical interviews are broken, algorithm style coding interviews, coding interview, whats wrong with technical interviews, coding interviews are broken, coding interviews are not broken, leetcode, devops engineer, i quit my job

Id: XRdeCoP-hi8

Length: 17min 29sec (1049 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 28 2021