Interviewing - Victor Huynh

I got hired!

2021-11-112021-12-12

So, after almost 3 months of interviewing, I finally got hired by TD via reference + 2 interviews! Very happy and relieved that this phase is over.

To be honest, even though it was sort of a rash decision to leave my job, I feel like these past 3 months have really given me a lot of insight on how I should lead my life. I’ve done a lot of thinking, especially with what is important to me, and I’ve really come to embrace the philosophy that less is more. I had previously thought that I was doing as little quantifiable things as possible already, but during these few months I’ve realized that it wasn’t necessarily true.

Sure, I was playing “2 games” and “2 sports” while focusing on my health, diet, and reading habits. But in reality, even though they’re objectively just under 10 things, the amount of time that was spread out was significant and skewed. It’s not difficult to believe that people tend to spend time on things that are more enjoyable (i.e. games/sports, as opposed to career or training), and I realized that it was the case for myself as well. The ratios were not as clean and consistent as I’d liked, and I had to make a change for the better if I wanted to achieve greater things.

I think ultimately, 1 sport to truly hone in on is ideal, you can see what golf and baseball did to Michael Jordan for example. Even though he was one of the greatest basketball players of all time, even with his athletic ability, drive and learning skills, there was no chance that he could amount to the people who were already great at that sport — not to mention that his main sport, basketball, had suffered a bit because his body was forced to adapt to these different circumstances.

I feel like people should be the same way and truly mean it. Perhaps it’s a little preachy or hypocritical even, but in this point and time, I don’t really see the point in exploring new hobbies when there are already hobbies that you highly regard and are a part of your identity. Could I live my life without knowing the pleasures of skiing and scuba diving? Probably. Would it be a life changing experience? Possible. But would it become a part of my identity in the long run? Unlikely.

Just some things that I was thinking about that I wanted to express in writing.

Interviewing

Change of Direction?

2021-10-312021-12-12

So after the previous post of getting exposed in an interview, one thing that the interviewers were talking about stood out to me. He had said that even though he thought he was a great developer, when he was exposed to the lead engineer, he didn’t feel like he was up to snuff, and didn’t think it was possible to even get to his level. This sort of thing kind of brought me to the realization that perhaps getting into an area that people already have years of experience and natural drive may not be the best route to “become the best”, per se.

I talked to one of my good friends from University, and he suggested that I try getting into DevOps, as it’s a relatively new, emerging field with lots of interesting technology. Not to mention, that it does have high demand and is necessary for a lot of larger projects down the road.

So, assuming that I can land the position (perhaps not as high position as he recommended, but a DevOps position nonetheless), I am going to prepare myself for this field of study and do my best. To be fair, I felt like I did give JavaScript a fair shot (ok, perhaps a little under what I would consider fair), but CSS just was not it for me. I felt like it was difficult and frustrating to work with, and I remember talking to one of my interviewers about it and they also felt like it was something that I should reconsider (front end position interviews lol).

Oh well, another day, another swap! Run it back, always learning.

Interviewing

Exposed in interview

2021-10-282021-12-12

As the title says, I got pretty exposed in one of my interviews. As we prodded along the interview, I realized that I didn’t really have a good idea of what I wanted to dive myself into. Metaphorically speaking, it is as if there were many pools, and I didn’t want to get myself wet until I knew which path that I wanted to get into. I never reached a conclusion to which one I wanted to get myself into, there’s just an overwhelming amount of paths I could take in my eyes. The interviewer felt that vibe from me pretty early into the interview, and I couldn’t help but agree that I wasn’t sure which path I wanted to go into, either from a lack of inspiration, direction, conviction, or a combination of either.

I’m not sure if I should employ the “fake it till you make it” strategy and just full-send it. Something to think about

Coding Portfolio

Roadblock

2021-09-272021-09-27

Probably one of the things that I’ve been experiencing and struggling with lately, because I really am not sure what the best way to approach things are. This is probably just a self-reflection step, but I’ve been thinking a lot about whether or not I should prioritize leveling up my technical, hard skills, or try to land more interviews first, and worry about the technical grind later. In theory, I did save up enough savings to survive and pay rent for half a year, but I’m not sure if I’m willing to deplete that resource during this phase of my life.

Perhaps the best approach would be to do both, but at the same time I’m struggling to prioritize between

Blogging (this is my form of journalling in a sense)
Technical skills (i.e. leetcode, codewars)
Knowledge gains (i.e. reading technical blogs/articles/books)
Portfolio gains (i.e. getting something to show/talk about on my resume)
Fitness goals (i.e. getting to the weight that I want, working on my strength/agility)
Sports goals (i.e. working on my skill, footwork in basketball/volleyball)
YouTube videos (this was especially tough for me because it feels like a lot of work for the least gains)
Social interactions (I’ve largely decided to cut down, because it was a big source of time sink)
and Reading (sometimes I’ve been caught up in doing other stuff that I felt like it was okay to skip reading days)

It’s been a lot to juggle, and I think I need to take a step back and think about what my time allocation and approach should be. It’s definitely been tough, even when I’m not working full-time, especially with a steady stream of rejections coming into my mailbox (lol). It seems like I don’t have enough time on my hands, even though I’ve been trying to maximize my time and efficiency. Interesting predicament.

Interviewing

Interviewing Process

2021-09-192021-09-19

So this blog post is a little late because I was trying to focus up on a set of interviews that I had for the week of September 12-19. I think they went well, but I’m hoping for some good news, finger crossed.

My strategy going into this was detailed in my About page, and I basically spent a lot of my time going through Cracking the Coding Interview, and spent additional time making sure that I understood and remembered the important data structures and algorithms. I feel like those are key when it came down to getting through the initial interview process, and I don’t think I was too far off.

However, I did feel like I could have spent a little more time doing some problems, because I felt like that would have gave me a better sense of language syntax that definitely needed to be brushed up on. During one of the interviews, the Data Structures & Algorithms one, even though I was coding in JavaScript (supposedly one of my more comfortable languages), I made a pretty easy syntax error.

The error in question was with ForEach, what went down was

(forEach var in options) {
}
// then I realized that it was an Object function, so I changed it to
options.forEach(var){
}
// then I had a syntax error when running the function, and in actuality I had to pass a function into forEach
options.forEach((var) => {
});

Pretty embarassing mistake, and I felt like after doing some more problems, I would have been way more comfortable writing code using these language specific functions. I spent more time on the actual theory than language specific application, which I think was a mistake, but mistakes happen. I hope it wasn’t a make or break thing lol.

My next steps would be

Complete all the practice problems in CTCI
Spend more time doing practice problems (currently doing codewars for JS)
After more confidence is made, work on learning as I create as learn before I create

It would probably be better for the interviewing process if I deployed projects right away, to have something to show and talk about, but I feel like I should solidify any questions and knowledge gaps first before I work on my Git stuff.

In theory, I would like to write beautiful, clean, and modular code right away, but I feel like there’s too much rust in my abilities at my current stage.

I got hired!

Change of Direction?

Exposed in interview

Roadblock

Interviewing Process

Codewars Progress Rank:7 kyu Honor:70 Total Completed Kata:13