Crunch Time

With possible interviews looming in the future and my resume poised for release into the job market, I've been reading everything I can get my hands on pertaining to programming interviews. My familiar search of "Programming interview questions and exercises" that I've typed into Google a hundred times, autofills and brings me to a long list of purpled visited web pages that I've grown familiar with. My Chrome bookmark bar has a folder labeled "Programming" with more subfolders than anything in my bookmark bar and within that, the "Interview Stuff" folder holds the most links in any folder. As I'm reading about the Apache framework for the tenth time and attempting to memorize it for server design, I start to wonder if everybody else is doing this to get an interview. Not everybody is doing it but if there happens to be even a few, I have to look better than them and be that much better prepared.

I buckle back down and start writing out a linked list problem on my whiteboard and walk my bed through the steps of inserting and deleting elements. My bed retorts with a witty question about wether I know how to find the half way point of that list on one pass; I draw a blank. The bed may have gotten the best of me for now but after I look it up one more time, I'll know it for good. As I'm reading through it I think about how I'm not going to have my computer to look anything up during my interview and how intimidating that is. I tell myself that they couldn't possibly expect me to have memorized every single thing from these book but a bad feeling lurks inside me as I imagine a candidate who does know all of these questions. The MIT graduate would easily breeze through these questions without breaking a sweat and would be charming, wonderful, and have a portfolio that could serve as dissertation. Back to the white board and my bed.

I've found myself in this cycle for the last couple of months and am memorizing a lot of useful information but am always on edge. I can't wait for the comfort of knowing that I'm working somewhere and can start contributing real software. It's not that I feel these study times aren't valuable, it just they're not producing actual products. I feel like a Padawan who must learn the tools of being a Jedi before combining them to be a badass force wielding programmer. After being hired I can unleash my programming force powers and defeat the dark side of the force (inefficiency). Alright, this might be a little too much fandom in the Star Wars area, but it gets the point across. This stage is nerve-racking and invalidating but I feel like it's a necessary evil.

Something else that I've noticed from having read a few programming interview books such as Cracking the Coding Interview and The Google Resume is how much my school didn't teach me about programming. The one conversation that you usually hear from liberal arts majors after college is, "at least you have a skill that you can use" which is partially right. In undergrad, I learned the valuable skill of programming, but if I wouldn't had done extra research and done outside projects I never would had known enough to be applying for jobs. Undergraduate work teaches you close to nothing that you need to know for programming actual applications and if anybody has ever attempted to create usable open source software, you know what I mean when I talk about the countless hours that I've spent reading online articles and watching Youtube videos to learn how to patch a project together. It's kind of frustrating to think of how much money that I've spent on my degree and how little that I've actually learned from the school. The school did do one amazing thing for me though, and that's that it opened my eyes to the possibilities. Without it, I'm not sure I would had ever pursued the number of projects that I have.

A few more months and I'll be back in the states and ready to start interviewing and now is the time to crunch and remember that my hard work will pay off (hopefully). Good luck to anybody else who is at this same stage of your career and know that there are others working just as hard as you and if you're an employer, I'm ready for whatever you've got. Looking forward to demonstrating what hard work I've put into this.

Thanks,
Joseph Priest