Tech IndustryOct 20, 2019
PayPalmaybeiam

The most challenging work you did recently

I have to be honest here, I work on a product(small distributed system) that impacts millions of people directly, a very fast paced environment which is totally feature driven. It's obviously domain centric because I work for PayPal and majority of the problems I solve is with money movement. It's highly critical and challenging because of the amount of work and context switching needed. Recently, I have started to interview and I realized though I work hard, it's not actually technically charging or any scalability challenge that i can boast about in an interview. I haven't solved any distributed problem because my product doesn't get billions of requests per day. Mostly in millions. I just use the open source DBs, messaging queues, model the feature e.t.c which for me is not challenging(or am I wrong?)Also, majority of the scalability challenges are solved by an ops team and there are proven architectural designs that can be reused for a new feature. Given this, how do I defend myself in interviews with companies which do get billions of requests per day? Do people esp those with < 7 years of experience get to solve any scalability challenge? Aren't there already proven designs in those companies as well? I want to understand if I got myself wrong in career path. TC : 250K YOE : 6

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Credit Karma 🐨Koala Oct 20, 2019

Join GCP, AWS or Azure if you want to solve scalability challenges. Also, nowadays who cares about your previous work experience. As long as you can do leetcode, you are hired!

Google manoi3 Oct 20, 2019

Too much stress.

Credit Karma 🐨Koala Oct 20, 2019

Lol. Can't get everything in life you know

Wipro VendettaV Oct 20, 2019

Telling Americans to use SI Most challenging ever !!!

PayPal maybeiam OP Oct 20, 2019

What's SI?

Uber 🛸Alien 🛸 Oct 20, 2019

Avoided layoff

Uber invite Oct 21, 2019

Refactored a big piece of shit into multiple pieces of smaller and manageable shit.

PayPal maybeiam OP Oct 21, 2019

Lol yeah, I did that, but after doing it, I felt all I did was being patient in life as I watched myself cleaning up shit, what's so challenging there

Rally Health Qhbc48 Jun 30, 2022

I am in same boat. People say you should be able to sell it, boast about it. Amplify it. When did doing your job became insufficient