Hello Everyone. I've never posted to tech careers so this is rather exciting. I'm currently in Detroit, and I have to admit my soul is being crushed. I don't really know what to do. I applied to Microsoft and didn't pass the screening. I know this was a product of me not practicing enough so I wanted to get advice on what I should do. I care less about TC and more just escaping the Midwest and growing as a developer. I know I need to do more CTCI and LeetCode and I'm okay with that, but has anyone felt trapped in the Midwest and more-so would anyone be willing to share guidance to a developer who works at a semi known but boring company that isn't well, good? Sorry for the bit of the rant.
Find an exciting step stone company. You can leave quicken for a startup in the area while you practice your interview prep.
That's fair advice. But uhh are there actually start ups in Michigan other than Duo (and to some extent Llama soft) and do those even count. Argo AI is an option I guess
You’re also thinking of big farther along startups, I bet there are tons of not so well known ones. Those especially since you’ll be part of super small team making high impact. I worked for one and we were only 3 devs.
If u are already a developer with some yoe it’s not so hard. LC and move. Tell me what’s stopping u and I’ll try to help.
I feel ya. The biggest hurdle I have is to get out of comfort zone and start working on leetcode and stuff. If by boring, you mean not so challenging tech, Learning to architect solutions such as Snapchat, Amazon order system is the biggest challenge. Finding and talking to people who know this stuff will help a lot.
So currently a lead on a project that handles about 1/4th the data coming into QL. It handles versioning, access rights and prevents duolications and some MDM. We get ~4k calls a minute at peak but I don't see QL making anything more complicated than this. I agree building systems that handle insane throughput sounds super cool to work on. Just not sure how to meet those people or get there
You are already much better position, understand different abstractions and their complexities at various levels in your data pipeline and see what can be done better and why. You will kill it at the unterviews