The most I can advise is:
- make sure your resume is good and ask people to review it for you
- apply to all jobs that you want to do, and mostly ignore the requirements (if it says you need to be in school for an internship, you probably need to follow that. But otherwise, ignore the rest and just apply)

Many mentees who have asked me about this are already doing the above, and unfortunately, I don’t have much advice beyond that. I’d be curious to hear what recruiters and/or hiring managers have to say on the topic, but sadly, my network doesn’t include many people working in those roles.

Good luck out there, and let’s hope that the market gets better!

I’ll list out the pros and cons for each. Going deep will give you specialized domain knowledge and perhaps make you more employable depending on what the specialization is. On the flip side, if the specialization is less needed in the industry, you might find it more difficult to find a job.

Trying many different areas may give you more opportunities for employment because chances are, more roles will fit what you know how to do and have experience in. The downside is, depending on what level the role is, the company might be looking for a person who knows that deeply. If you try different areas and end up becoming really knowledgeable in each area, this could work.

For my personal journey, I chose breadth (unintentionally). I just followed what I enjoyed doing the whole time and didn’t really think about whether I wanted depth or breadth. As a result, my career thus far has been:
- software for hardware in C for two years
- mobile web doing React / Redux for half a year
- Android for half a year
- web development with Angular for 3 years (well, really 2.5 years)
- Developer Relations (DRE) since Sept 2021

Recruiting each time was hard for me but I was able to find a job every time — I got interviews, I just wasn’t good at passing the interviews. Caveat: I haven’t really looked for a job outside my current company since 2017, so I don’t know how my wide experience would fare in today’s market. (That being said, I’d look for another DRE job, not SWE.)

Outside of work, my hobbies also are many but I’m not super good at any (except for piano and volleyball that I started when I was 5 and 12 years old, respectively. I also arguably have a really good cardio system from almost daily running / hiking. But otherwise, I do a really wide range of activities but I’m not superb at any of them).

As a person, my career actually aligns with my personality: wanting to try a lot of different areas but not diving deep down to any. I’m a bit hesitant to give any advice on this because I don’t strongly know today’s market and how people are recruiting — but for myself personally, I still choose to follow what I enjoy doing and hope everything works out in the end.

When I was in university, technical interviews weren’t “mainstream” yet. Hackerrank was created when I was halfway through university, and Leetcode was made after I had already graduated. Most of my interviews were behavioral, and maybe a handful of big tech companies had technical interviews (of which I didn’t do well on), but there wasn’t this grind of doing Leetcode back then.

I think expectations of what students needed to do were also lower back then, as I believe now, students are told that they need: a) good grades, b) projects, c) extracurricular activities (that showcase leadership), and d) experience. I don’t know how any student is supposed to have all of these, and I’d like to believe that recruiters don’t expect students to be miracle workers. I’m not sure if my belief is correct though.

What I’m almost confident of is, if I had to survive in the computer science world now as a student, I’m not sure how I would handle time management either. I can write down some tips, but it’ll be up to you to try and see if they work for you.

Throughout university and my career, I’ll always keep a list of items I need to do. If there are any recurring or daily items, I’ll do those first in the day to get them out of the way. I run every day, and it’s one of the first activities I’ll do when I wake up before the rest of the day gets in the way. When I was looking for my second full-time job (while doing my first full-time job), I made sure to leetcode right after dinner every day.

I also utilize the time when my brain is best, and for me, that’s the morning. If for you, that’s night time, then use it. Don’t try to wake up early to do your work. Do it at night, sleep later, it’s fine (unless you have early classes that you can’t pick another time for).

Another important but perhaps counterintuitive decision I’ve made is to rest. My brain can’t handle working 24/7, and sleep is important. Resting is important. I slept at around 11PM every day in university, no matter what I had coming up, because if I didn’t, I knew the next day would be a waste of time because my brain wouldn’t be fully functional. I wrote an article about “doing nothing”, and it could be helpful to read it.

I’m not sure if these tips are helpful because as I said, I’m not really sure what I would do to balance the immense load of schoolwork, looking for jobs, and leetcode practice. Let me know if you’ve found techniques that help you, so I can make those suggestions to others!

A lot of mentees ask about the recruiting process that I went through, and all I can share is my experience. The process has definitely changed since 2017 as it’s now 2024, but I’m happy to share what my process was like. I am not a recruiter and I’m not here to teach you how to get into Google, but many people have asked me what it was like so here goes. I’ll talk about the most recent experience, not only because it’s the most recent but also because I don’t really remember the other two times.

I want to stress that this article is about my experience in 2017. There have probably been changes since then. Also, remember that this is one person’s experience, which is not representative of every experience that a SWE went through.

Interview Process

As an introduction, the way interviews work at Google for software engineers is that you interview for a SWE position but not specifically for a team. Your interviewers don’t know each other, and after the interviews, all of their feedback gets gathered by the recruiter. For phone interviews, I think the recruiter decides based on the feedback whether you get an onsite.

After the onsite, also with interviewers who don’t know each other, your feedback is gathered by the recruiter. The recruiter probably does a quick glance to see if you have a chance of getting an offer, and if so, your packet gets passed to a hiring committee, also made of people who don’t know each other. They’re the ones who ultimately make the call of whether you get an offer.

If they give you the green light, then essentially, you’re good to go! You’ll then go through the team matching process where you tell the recruiter what you’d like to work on (tech stack, team, product, etc) and the recruiter tries to find hiring teams that match your desire. Once they find one, they’ll have the team’s hiring manager talk to you and there are no technical questions asked during this time, as the conversation mostly revolves around your desires and experience, and most importantly, gives you a chance to ask any questions you have to the team you might be joining.

My Experience

I had a recruiter contact from when I interviewed in 2016, and I also had a friend who was working at Google (and still is, actually). I think I reached out to the recruiter and then asked my friend to refer me, but in any case, I got the interview. At that time, I was going through final interviews with a ton of company and Google was (and still is) known to be notoriously slow because of hiring committees (more on that later), I skipped the two phone interviews and went straight to an onsite.

I suspect this happened because when I interviewed in 2016, I might’ve been pretty close, so combined with the fact that I had a bunch of onsite interviews with other companies, I was pushed through faster.

Before the onsite, I went to a workshop where they walked through an interview prep session teaching you how to go through the interview. I don’t remember much from that but it was probably about how you have to talk through your thought process and probably covered parts of (or all of?) what I write in this blog post about interviewing.

The day of the onsite, I was a tad late (I forgot why but I think I stopped by a lost and found on the way), oops. In any case, I had 5 interviews, all technical data structure and algorithm ones. Since I had less than 5 years of experience at that time, I didn’t have to do a systems design interview — thank goodness because I’ve not gotten job offers many times due to this sort of interview.

My onsite was 10AM-3:15PM, and I remember walking out of each one not exactly knowing whether I did well or not. I had an answer on the board each time, but was it the optimal solution? Did I get too much help? I don’t know.

But what I do know is that 3 out of 5 gave me a yes, 1 was on the border, and 1 said no. The recruiter wouldn’t tell me which one was on the border and no (I took a guess but was wrong). I guess it doesn’t matter since I got the job.

My process was pretty fast probably because they knew I was going through final interviews with other companies. It only took 9 days from the day of my interview for the hiring committee to make a decision!

I took the job and asked if I could have 4 months off, and initially the recruiter told me no (but new-grads can) which didn’t make any sense to me, knowing how the process works. Teams are always hiring so why does it matter if I start now or 4 months later? Just have to do team matching later.

I didn’t ask because I didn’t want to piss off the person in charge of giving me a job. I was given 6 weeks so I took off, and during the first week, she called me and said I could have 4 months. I don’t know what changed her mind, but yay!

We started team matching 3 months later, and it took me a lot longer to find a team I wanted. I asked for teams in Europe and NYC, and eventually in mid-June, I talked to who would be my first manager(s) at Google. I had one or two other team matching conversations before that, but neither were good fits.

I remember this team match happened in the morning when I was on a road somewhere in Utah or Colorado, and we talked about travel at the end. Both managers gave me really good vibes, and they seemed to really care about what I cared about as they mentioned aspects of their team, unprompted. I knew after the call that I wanted to join their team, and thankfully, they did too. Yay!

I don’t know how it happened that I got start dates in late July, mid-Aug, and late Aug (or early Sept)? But I stupidly chose mid-Aug instead of pushing it back to the last date, and after I had told the recruiter mid-Aug, I asked if I could have the last date. Apparently the team was already told when I’d start so I couldn’t change it anymore, boo.

In any case, my start date was Aug 13, 2018. It’s been a long time on Firebase (although I started as a SWE, did GIR, changed to DRE, and did GIR again) and a pretty good time!

Our beliefs, no matter how we ended up with them, affect our behavior and the way we conduct ourselves at school, at work, and in life at large. Oftentimes, we are held back due to these beliefs, but it’s difficult to realize we have these beliefs that are affecting our progress. Shifting our mindset can help us move forward towards what we want, and in this article, I’ll talk about beliefs that both I personally identified and overcame as well as from those who I’ve mentored over my career.

I grew up in California in the US, and I went to university nearby and ended up studying computer science. School was really hard for me. I studied more than anyone else I knew (my dorm mates played video games all day, didn’t really go to class, didn’t really study) but I still got the worst grades out of everyone I knew. It made me bitter and made me feel like life was unfair, but there was nothing I could do about that. What’s worse is that in my second year, I stumbled upon a ton of people who were literally geniuses because they had started coding when they were five years old. I started when I went to university, and I started computer science even later than everyone else because I took a bit of time trying to figure out what I wanted to do. It wasn’t fair that they were way ahead of me and understood much faster than me, and it wasn’t fair that I had to spend so much time studying just to get worse grades than everyone. I also ended up spending way more time interviewing than anyone else I knew. But what could I do about all of that? Well, I can’t really change other people. What I could do is work hard, and I did. I had discipline, I started my projects the day they got announced, started studying for exams way in advance. I did what I had to do to give my best shot, and that’s all that I can ask from myself. I need to keep learning, keep improving, and keep moving forward. I don’t need to compare with others, I just need to make sure that today me is better than yesterday me, that today me is better than a year ago me. Constant improvement, comparing myself to myself. I’m happy to say that 12 years after my first computer science class, I have indeed improved. Phew!

So what’s the belief that I want to talk about here?
Belief: I’m not good enough because everyone else around me is doing better.
Counterbelief: No need to compare yourself to others, compare yourself to you. Are you better than you were a year ago? A month ago? Yesterday? If your answer is yes, then you’re doing just fine. It doesn’t matter how well (or badly) everyone else is doing.

Eventually, I made it through university and got my first job. I often get asked from university students and new graduates about how they should spend time preparing for their internship or full-time job. I always say go play, devote time to your hobbies, take a break, watch Netflix all day, go travel. That’s how you can prepare — take a break so your brain is fresh to go, your mental health is in a good place, and you are ready to do work again. Because you got hired for the job, the company knows you have the potential, and you will learn what you need to know on the job. To help you learn what you need to know, learning how to ask questions. That was one of my biggest learnings in my first job, and I continued to improve upon it over the years. I quickly realized that part of the more senior people’s job is to provide mentorship and help to the more junior engineers, and this is true for all companies I’ve worked at. I learned how to provide enough context, talk about what I already tried, and ultimately ask the question I needed an answer. It’s definitely a skill that is part of the job. Nobody knows everything, and we all need help sometimes. And that’s okay.

So what’s the belief that I want to talk about?
Belief: Because I got this job, I need to know everything and I don’t want to bother people with my questions.
Counterbelief: Because I got this job, I have the potential to do everything. Asking questions after trying myself will unblock me faster. My take on asking questions (at work) is to search and do everything in my power to unblock myself, but when I don’t know what else to try or search, ask for help. Sometimes, the answers to your questions are tribal knowledge, so you might not be able to find the answer no matter how hard you try!

After my second job, I was looking for yet another job. I interviewed at Google for the third time, and that’s not counting the once or twice I did in university. I basically interviewed once a year since I graduated from university, and each time I did, I got a bit closer. Each time I would interview, I studied, had interviews at other companies, and then also interviewed at Google. Finally on my third time, I passed and got the job.

So what’s the belief I want to talk about?
Belief: If a company rejects me, I must not be good enough. Since I can’t get a job or a promotion, there must be something wrong with me.
Counterbelief: Keep trying. Get better. Also, for a job, it’s not (necessarily) you, it could be the company, economy, or bureaucracy. Or it’s simply not time yet. Don’t give up after the first try if you really want it, figure out how to get better, practice, and keep working towards it.

Before I started at Google, I went traveling for a few months and I got a rental car in New Zealand. Its battery died because I left the light on overnight. Got it jumped, drove to trailhead, after finishing the hike, found that it died again. Sat at the bottom of the hike asking every person for jumper cables, didn’t have any. My hiking buddy called the hostel if they had cables (yes they did), I rode in a trailer for the first time in my life thanks to a lady who offered to take us back to town if needed. Got cables from the hostel, hitchhiked for the first time in my life back to the trailhead. Asked first person I saw to help jump the car, but ended up speaking Chinese to him because he didn’t know English. He also didn’t know how to jump a car. I did, and he said it’s impressive for a woman to be able to do this. Day didn’t go as planned because I made a boo-boo, but I ended up having many firsts, broke some gender stereotypes, and had an amazingly great day!

What’s the belief I want to talk about here?
Belief: Mistakes and failure are bad.
Counterbelief: What is failure? To me, failure is not growing. It almost doesn’t matter if the result is what I wanted — if it is and I did it without learning, I failed. If it wasn’t but I grew, I was successful. The worst is if I didn’t get the outcome I wanted and didn’t learn from it. As long as I learned, it was a good experience (although maybe painful nonetheless sometimes). Also, accidents happen and they might turn into a great experience!

The first day I met my manager at Google, he told me I could get a company phone. I asked him if I had to, because I don’t have a smartphone. In my entire life, I’ve only had a smartphone for about 7 months, and that’s because I had to be on-call at my last job. I got my first phone in high school, and it was a flip phone because I’m old enough to be in that era. I got it not because I asked but because my parents decided it was time. I’ve been playing since junior high, and in high school on game days against other schools, I would borrow my teammates’ phones to call my parents after the games were done if they couldn’t attend. My parents finally decided enough was enough and got me a flip phone with only calling. I think phone plans back then didn’t come with an automatic texting plan. I basically pretended like I didn’t have a phone and would only use it for volleyball games, which was fine during high school. My parents didn’t appreciate it so much when I started university, because they would try to call me and I wouldn’t answer because my phone was out of battery or I was out and didn’t bring my phone. I told them to email me if they need to contact me, because if I’m out, I’m not going to talk to them anyway and would tell them I’ll call them back when I’m home…essentially the same as them emailing me, which I would check when I get home. So life was like that and every so often, my parents would ask if I wanted a smartphone. No, no, no. I got annoyed at them asking me. Life was great without one, I didn’t need it. As I moved through university, got my first job, second job, started traveling more, organizing events for meetups and for work, I didn’t need a phone. I would be in the present and present only when I was out, and I’d attend to all the messages and emails and everything else when I was home. I know how to read maps, and I’m good at memorizing directions if needed because that part of my brain constantly gets exercised. That’s the way I wanted to live my life, and that’s how I continue to live my life. So, dear Google manager, do I have to have a phone? After listening to this story, he said no, no you don’t. (But just as a caveat, everyone has the choice to get one or not get one).

What’s the belief I want to talk about here?
Belief: Things have to be done the way they always have been done or because everyone else is doing it.
Counterbelief: Maybe true to some extent, but if you don’t like the way things have been done, change it. If you want to do something differently, do it. You’re allowed to be different. In fact, you should be different. Do what you want, ask for what you want, make change. Your boss / manager can’t read your mind and won’t know what you want, and you might be surprised and get what you want if you just ask! Worst case scenario is they say no, which would’ve been the same outcome as if you didn’t ask. Best case scenario, you get what you want (or more)! This goes for general life as well — ask for what you want even if it’s unconventional, because if you don’t ask or try to get it, nobody else will give it to you.

A few years into my Google career, the pandemic hit. Thankful that I still had my job, but I got a bit bored because I was stuck at home and couldn’t do anything. I had a great app idea and got connected with another developer who had a few years of experience under his belt, both of us were front-end engineers. We mostly built it out and then started looking for others to help. On the way, I was constantly wondering whether the way we architected everything was the correct way, but there was not really any way for either of us to know since we were the most senior people working on this project. Now, I’m still not entirely convinced we built it in the best way, but based on our respective experiences, I want to believe that we built it out properly and in a scalable, maintainable way.

So what’s the belief that I want to talk about here? This one might not be very obvious, but
Belief: I must be the best person in the room in order to be successful.
Counterbelief: When you’re the best in the room, it’s difficult to know how to grow and have guidance / mentorship.

Also during the pandemic, about a year in, I got randomly re-org’d without being asked what team I wanted to be on (and others I worked closely with got re-org’d to the team I wanted to be in). I was extremely angry, expressed this to my manager as well as my skip-level, but nothing could be done as there was no room in the team I wanted to join. A bit of time later, in my performance review feedback, my manager told me I should be more positive about the reorg even though my performance was still the way it was before the reorg. No, I really shouldn’t be more positive. I gave him (and his skip) feedback on that feedback.

So what’s the belief that I want to talk about here?
Belief: I must take feedback and change accordingly.
Counterbelief: Think about whether the feedback makes sense for you. Have you gotten that feedback many times or just once? If the latter, maybe keep it at the back of your mind but if it doesn’t make sense, be unapologetically yourself. If you got it with regards to performance at work, you should probably listen to it in order to reach your work goals, but if friends or coworkers (or strangers?) give you personal feedback, you don’t have to listen to everyone who gives you feedback.

I seem to have a lot of pandemic stories. Last one, I promise. As I mentioned before, I had a lot of free time on my hands during the pandemic, so I volunteered at Google-sponsored hackathons to help students with Firebase, ideation, debugging, and general coding. Some colleagues from Google Cloud also did, and some would give presentations. One of them was a developer relations engineer, and as nobody ever knows what this is, he described it, and he described it as a social software engineer. Throughout my career, I’ve loved coding but have always wanted to do something more people-facing since I really enjoy talking to people. So, once I heard about this job, I reached out to him and other colleagues internally to figure out actually what this job entails. I talked to a ton of people and decided to try it, eventually switching to it full-time and is what I do now. If you asked university-me what I’d be doing today, I definitely wouldn’t have told you developer relations engineer! In fact, if you asked university-me what I’d be doing today, I would’ve told you I’m very far into my career as a software engineer, am married, still living in California, and have a kid already. Well, I clearly am not a plan follower because none of those plans were followed, and my life is great!

So what’s the belief that I want to talk about here?
Belief: I must follow a x-year plan for my career and life. Related: experienced people have their life figured out
Counterbelief: Roughly knowing what you want and working towards it is good — not planning also opens lots of opportunities, ones that you might not have noticed if you have a tunneled vision towards your goal. Being flexible and adaptable to change is the biggest lesson I’ve learned, both on a smaller scale (day to day life) and bigger scale (career, general life), and I can’t imagine my life without all the random unexpected changes I’ve had.

I went to Grace Hopper Conference in the US for the first time during my last year in university, and it’s a conference celebrating women in tech. Women who have done amazing things, and it was the first time I was exposed to the challenges of being a woman in tech. In university, of course I had noticed that there weren’t very many women, but I just accepted that that’s how it is. At the conference, I learned about inequalities due to the imbalance of gender, such as unequal pay, different bars for promotion, and different expectations for behavior. Because equality is such a core value for me personally, I wanted to change this, and I realized at my second time attending the conference that education is a way to try to increase diversity in tech. Trying to break the general stereotypes around working in tech — that it’s hard, that it’s not for women, that only “smart” people do it — is easier to do when people are younger, when people are still going through the education system. And since then, I’ve been involved in a lot of Google’s diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. We have a lot of programs in the US where we partner with historically black colleges which are historical because they were from the segregation times where black people and white people could not go to the same schools. These colleges were specifically for black people. We also partner with Hispanic-serving institutes, which are universities with many Hispanics but also have other ethnicities as well. I’ve led student teams to build an app from scratch, put together events at universities for resume reviews, mock interviews, and various career workshops. In general, I’ve done a lot of mentoring and teaching, and one of the programs I’ve enjoyed the most is one where we teach introduction to computer science full-time at these partnering universities, and we basically leave our day to day job to teach full-time at the university, which includes making the syllabus, actually teaching, and then creating lesson plans, homework, labs, exams, projects, and pretty much anything a teacher or professor would have to do. I can keep talking and talking and talking about all this, and if you have questions about it or want to hear more, I’m happy to share more. I want to get to the point of me talking about all this. I do a lot of work in DEI, but it took me a long time to realize I do so much that I’ve almost taken it as part of my job. All of this is voluntary, nobody told me I have to go do it, and it’s absolutely not required and it’s not part of my job. I even got an award recently because I do so much DEI work. And in the more recent years, when I get asked what I do or when I introduce myself professionally, I talk about being a developer relations engineer AND doing DEI work. It took me quite a bit of time to realize I should give myself credit for doing all the DEI work I do and tell people about it, because it’s a lot. It’s almost a second job.

So what’s the belief that I want to talk about here?
Belief: I don’t want to brag about what I do.
Counterbelief: Being humble is definitely a good characteristic, but that doesn’t mean you can’t tell people about what you do. Take credit for what you do and tell people about it. It might make others interested in doing the same, and maybe you can loop them into doing an activity that you’re passionate about! And, you never know what might inspire and motivate others.

As a kid, I didn’t like talking to people. I remember a story from when I was in 4th grade and my mom asked me to ask my teacher a question after school because my mom needed the answer. I didn’t want to because I was scared. Somehow, that changed in high school, more so in university, and even more so after university. I joined a bunch of clubs during my last year in university and met a lot of people that way, and at my last internship, I organized weekly intern dinners. After university, I ran a meetup group for people in their 20’s to go hiking, eating, bowling, photographing, and who knows what else. I got into Couchsurfing when I moved to NYC and met strangers almost on a daily basis. And from meeting so many people, especially different people thanks to living in NYC and traveling, my mind has opened to more perspectives, lifestyles, and general understanding of the world. Two important outcomes of my life that came out of talking to such a big variety of people are:
- I’ve become more empathetic and non-judgmental towards people because I realized that people always have reasons for behaving and believing what they believe, it’s just a lack of understanding that we disagree off the bat.
- I came across the idea of living nomadically from meeting people who do it. A ton of backpackers and low-budget travelers take time off to travel and explore the world to gain more understanding of themselves as well. A lot of these travelers work seasonal jobs too, like working at a summer camp or ski resort, work really hard and many hours, then take time off to travel. And yet others permanently travel — but not as vacation with a checklist. They, or shall I say we, stay in a place for a bit longer, and we work when we need to and go exploring otherwise, continuing to open our mind, meet people, and explore the world. This lifestyle is definitely not one I could’ve thought of myself, as my environment back in California did not have people like this. But, thanks to meeting people from different places and all stages of life, I became more accustomed to these thoughts and am now quite surrounded by people like me doing this. Needless to say, it has been life-changing, and I can’t imagine living a life not like this.

So what’s the belief I’d like to talk about here?
Belief: The world is a dangerous place and we shouldn’t talk to strangers
Counterbelief: Talking to people opens minds to more perspectives, increases empathy, and improves communication. It might change your life. I became better at my job because I was able to talk to people better, especially now since I’m doing developer relations engineering. If talking to strangers is difficult for you, it’s a skill that if you practice will get easier, like everything in life. Talking to people will also likely open up opportunities to you as you learn more about the world.

Conclusion

So what I’ve shared with you today are beliefs that many people have that may be holding them back from their true potential, along with the counter beliefs that can drive people forward instead. I’m quite an action-oriented person, so if I heard my talk today, I might be asking myself: how do I actually change my current perspective and authentically believe these empowering beliefs when my existing beliefs feel so real and so strong? Well, recognizing that these existing beliefs might be limiting you from your potential is the first step. Change isn’t instant nor is it trivial, and over time, hopefully reminding yourself that these empowering beliefs exist will drive change.

I want to also end by asking you: what is success? It’s personal to every person, and your definition might not be the same as your best friend’s definition. Often, I find that it could mean:
- Attending a “good” university, whatever “good” means
- Getting a “good” job at a “good” company
- Earning a high salary
- Supporting one’s family
- Continuous growth
- Being happy

For me, it means living the life I want to live filled with activities I want to do and meaningful relationships, and the ideas I’ve shared are mindsets and perspectives I have to help me get to where I am.

10 (Counter) Beliefs Helping You Succeed was originally published in Women in Technology on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

First off, if you don’t have an internship, keep applying. Ask industry professionals look at your resume as that’s the first step towards getting a job. Practice Leetcode for online assignments (OA’s) and in general, keep practicing for interviews.

If you really don’t end up getting an internship, there’s plenty of good uses of time:
- look for research positions with professors at school (research experience is experience too!)
- do projects, build apps, join hackathons (MLH has a lot offree hackathons for universities and Devpost has a ton too)
- work on open-source projects and see whether you can get mentorship from people who maintain those projects
- check out various programs like Google’s Summer of Code and MLH’s Fellowship
- CodePath has free courses on web, Android, iOS, and cybersecurity with group projects

If you’re struggling to get a full-time job, I’d recommend doing the same as the above. It’s just a not great time to be looking for a job right now, and I know full-time professionals are struggling too with all the layoffs and whatnot. Hopefully we’ll get past this soon, and keep sharpening your skills, learning more, and be ready for opportunities - they’ll come!

You’ll work hard to get to where you need to be to do what you want to do. You’ll have to. I had to. We all have to, even the people who started when they were 5. It might take you a few more years to get where you want to be, so be it. You’ll get there.

And guess what? The time you spent doing other activities that those who started coding when they were 5 got you other skills, more diverse skills. Sure, they might not actually help you in this field. But they might, and even if they don’t, you got some other life experiences that has shaped you into who you are. So even if you’re “behind” in programming, computer science, your major, or whatever, you’re ahead in some way.

You just have to see it that way.

And nobody ever compares themselves with the people who are behind. What about the people who started the major after you? Or today? They’re not where you are. They’re behind you.

My point of all this is, there’s no point in comparing. Yes, you need a job and other people who do have all that background also need a job. Well, lucky for you, the tech industry has a bajillion jobs, so them taking a job doesn’t mean you can’t have one.

A lot of mentees ask about imposter syndrome, and this is what I tell them as well. I strongly believe a lot of imposter syndrome comes from comparison, but if you enjoy this field and/or are determined to be in this field, then you belong here. It doesn’t matter what other people are doing. It only matters what you are doing.

Focus on what you’ve accomplished. Compare yourself to you. Are you better than yesterday? A week ago? A year ago? If the answer is yes, then you’re moving forward, and that’s all we can ask from oursleves.

I went into college with no coding experience at all, so yes, at least the introduction courses were useful, because that’s where I (sort of) learned how to code. The data structures and algorithm classes because interviews. Everything else? Maybe.

The way my university worked at the time I attended was we had to take six upper division classes in the computer science or electrical engineering department (my degree was in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, which was one major). I took algorithms, networking, human computer interaction, databases, operating systems, security, and artificial intelligence, and they were all quite theoretical. In my entire time at university, I only had one class that required us to build an app from scratch, and I’m not sure whether we even needed a backend for it. Did I use knowledge I learned from any of these classes in my day-to-day as a software engineer? Nope!

Well, not anymore. At my first job, I was basically doing networking work, but I didn’t really have to know the information I learned in my networking class. However, if I didn’t take the networks class, I wouldn’t have known that I enjoyed networking and to do it as a career. That statement can be applied to any course we take in school: until we take that class, we might not know what it is or we might not even be aware of the concept, thus making it impossible for us to intentionally choose it as a career. Will we actually choose one of those topics to center our career on? Maybe, maybe not, but without taking the class, we won’t know.

For all of these classes, someone has to know it, even if it’s not you. Someone has to do the networking, someone has to work on databases, someone has to do the UX, someone has to take care of security, someone has to know operating systems in order to help create it, someone has to know about AI to make new products for that space. Maybe it’s not you, maybe it is you. The specific classes expose us to different aspects of computer science, and so one person isn’t going to use all of those classes in a job. But, you might be using knowledge from at least one of those classes.

Having a basic understanding of these concepts or at least being aware that these concepts exist is also good because if you’re building an app, chances are at least some of these topics become relevant. And if they’re not relevant, someone out there is taking care of it for you (ie if you’re using a cloud solution) or you eventually have to do it yourself.

Beyond that, I practiced coding, debugging, and testing throughout all of my classes because there were projects. I learned how to learn, I learned debugging techniques, I learned how to search on the internet and how to solve problems. I learned to be persistent (well, to be fair, I didn’t learn this in college per se as I’ve always been persistent, but I exercised persistency and consistency a lot), I learned when to walk away and take a break or work on another assignment, I learned to control frustrations. I learned I loved coding and would get into the zone when I did it. All of this is most definitely useful in industry.

I didn’t have many college courses with teamwork, but that’s another aspect that is incredibly relevant. Teamwork usually means using version control (which every company uses) as well as communication and delegation, depending on how the project is set up. A lot of soft skills are required when working in industry, and these are extremely important — if not almost more important — than technical skills.

Not super related to coursework, but for college in general, extracurriculars like joining clubs and being in leadership positions are helpful and likely to grow transferrable industry skills, again with soft skills. Joining clubs, especially clubs unrelated to your major, will result in being exposed to different types of people and force you to work and communicate with them (or maybe you’ll cry out of frustration at how different they are and just leave the club, which is also perfectly fine. Do what makes sense). Having leadership positions within organizations will hopefully teach you how to lead a team, how to motivate others, how to recognize a good leader (and thus a good manager).

All in all, being exposed to people outside of your bubble (regardless of how you do it whether that means school clubs / organizations, studying abroad, team sports, or taking lots of classes outside of your major) will build leadership, teamwork, and communication skills, as well as probably lead to more empathy and in general, learning how to interact with people who may not have the same viewpoints.

So that’s just a long way of saying: the actual things you learn in school, probably not the most helpful beyond being exposed to the ideas and concepts. But the other things that you have to do to get through classes and extracurricular activities? Probably very helpful in industry.

Do we actually use data structures and algorithms questioned during interviews at work? Generally not the algorithms, and if we did, we’d probably look up the basic ones (binary search, sort, etc) or use the built-in method from the programming language to do it.

In terms of data structures, we most definitely use basic data structures and depending on what sort of work one ends up doing, one may use more data structures than the basic ones. The important aspect of data structures is to know when to use which one as well as how to use them. Just like in interviews.

Also just like in interviews, we also do think about what assumptions or clarifications we make/need and think about/write down potential solutions before jumping into coding and implementing a feature or product.

Just like in interviews, while we’re doing implementation, we do critical thinking, ask questions, and take people’s feedback and incorporate it. We need to know how to explain what we’re doing to other people.

Just like in interviews, we think about what test cases to test, determine what the correct behavior is, debug when the code isn’t producing the correct result, and ensure the code behaves correctly accordingly.

Just like in interviews, when the code isn’t working correctly, we need to go through it line by line to debug — perhaps by using a sample input. Maybe ask for help — and again, we’d have to be able to explain what’s going on.

So maybe the exact data structure or algorithm question doesn’t matter, but a lot of what goes on in an interview does in fact reflect what a software engineer does. Logical thinking and problem solving, being able to explain and take feedback — that’s all part of the job.

I also believe these sort of interviews are maybe the least biased and thus fairest because there is a right or wrong answer, the most optimal solution. On the flip side, these sorts of interviews are inequitable because they favor people who have time to spend practicing, so the interviews are unfair to those who have other obligations (work, family, etc) and may not have time to practice. In addition to being inequitable, they can still be unfair because how much help given to a candidate can be measured subjectively. (Un)conscious bias can still affect how an interviewer talks to a candidate (and therefore affect the outcome).

I think companies are rethinking their hiring strategies, but since I’m not a recruiter and I’m not particularly passionate about this problem space, I don’t know exactly what the industry is doing. I do know there’s been an increase in focusing on diversifying the candidate pipeline in an attempt to increase diversity at companies.

Regardless, this is the process now, and hopefully this post makes them seem a little more bearable.