What are some humbling moments of your careers? How do you best use these events to propel you forward? For me it's going to interviews with little to no preparation thinking I might be good to go with the knowledge I had in my head, as it's been about 3 years since I've last prepped seriously for an interview. Next time around I'll need to make sure I'm serious before attempting anything like that. I guess I just wanted to see where I stood. Anyway, it's not the end of the world. TC - 280 YOE - 5
Career Wise: Failing my startup, had huge hopes going into it and it was a wild 2 years. Interview rejection is also humbling but not as much and you definitely don’t learn as much from it.
I see, I think the startup is less so because it's such a momentous task. You can't sign up for startup training and expect to succeed. Anyway I can understand the immense disappointment as you likely put your all into that effort Thanks for the contribution
Yea, an interview rejection doesn’t cost you $20k.
My first system design interview.
Interesting, what about it? Where did you find the holes were in your ability to answer?
Trying to speak intelligently about scalable systems I don’t use and have never used because I work in a company that has internal systems that “just work” (usually) High level is fine. NoSQL this, caching that, etc. Deep dive not so much, e.g. Cassandra v. HBase
A really friendly, new coworker died suddenly in his sleep a couple weeks after joining the company. He sat right by me. Super nice guy.
Well not a single experience per se, but me thinking I knew a lot early/was a badass in my career early on. That was 10 years ago and the more you learn, the more you see how little you actually knew.
+1
This is IT right here. The older the get, the more we realize how much we don’t know - about anything.
Are you a SWE at Google currently? Where did you interview if you don't mind sharing?
Probably not a great idea to reveal position or company. Maybe if I knew the reasoning behind the question I could maybe help with that
Sure! I'm curious to see if clearing a SWE interview at Google implies that you should be able to clear other interviews without needing any practice. Especially when you haven't interviewed for a while.
All my Sys design interviews tbh. Common issue of mine is focusing too much on details, and that’s a big no no when tackling a problem to design an entire end to end workflow. I always blamed lack of knowledge for this, but lately starting to accept it’s the fault of the fellow in the mirror.
I think I'm starting to get humbled by the fact that I understand fairly well about system design, as a solutions architect. I see SDEs struggle with system design and I'm like thats the easy[ier] part! Then I see some of the stuff you guys write and it flies way over my head. So i probably shouldnt take that for granted.
Is that like the evil monkey in family guy?
I feel kinda humbled right this moment, after i realized today that all i have been doing the past 15 years is just face, solve or escape crisis-after-crisis while my career and personal finances have gotten no better as i had previously aspired before finishing college.
What's your career path look like so far?
So far - 15 years programming. 12 years on visa. body-shop consultant. multiple clients - retail, state taxation and fed depts, media-houses, mostly ib. TC never moved past 140K, barely any retirement savings or financial planning, other than a huge pile of after-tax cash. no one offering an fte, visa and gc sponsorship. Not built for FAANG does not have to mean not meant to pursue a career as a programmer at all?
For me: Evo moment 37 On a more serious note, getting rejected by smaller companies. I interviewed at a consulting firm to practice for big tech interviews, thinking I would nail it and got rejected
Cafeteria guy giving that extra rice...bliss
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How bad was it?
Not great, but it screamed that I should have prepared which is the worst thing. That and I don't have much natural talent and instead work hard when appropriate
Doing poorly on FAANG interviews doesn’t mean you don’t have “natural talent”. There is nothing natural about those interviews. All it means is you didn’t study/prepare for the interviews well enough.