Fright and Elitism

It's been a while since the last time that I posted and much of my situation has changed and many events have occurred that have put me in a drastically different spot than I was in a few months ago. To give a recap, the last time I posted was in March. At this time I was still in the military looking to update my portfolio and was applying at positions in America (I was in Japan) with little success. Things seemed to be going well with the process because I was learning and continuing to code which were the two most important parts of the process. Since then I've gotten my first in-office programming role, sought opportunities in multiple companies, and have refined my search to a point.   These events have led me to some revelations that could be helpful to others looking for a similar path in this career.

First, let me mention that getting a programming job is not as simple as just applying and testing in. This will seem obvious for anybody that has already gone through the process but I still remember how it felt to be applying for random positions, just hoping for any job that had me working with code. Getting a job at a company as a programmer is about marketability of yourself(this could be said about any job), understanding what they need, understanding what you offer, and selling yourself to them for the job. I believe a lot of this is self explanatory or implied with any job but programming positions can be tricky. 

When you interview for a technical role in a company you get two feelings; one of fright and one of elitism. The fright comes from not knowing what specific questions the company is going to ask you about for the technical interview. There are literally an infinite number of programming questions one can be asked due to the nature of the field and most of them are difficult. The questions could range from basic data structure questions such as, "How would you store orders from a customer?" to more advanced topics like, "How would you create a neural network to create an adaptive AI?" The second questions sounds like you're being interviewed for a senior position for either gaming or some robotics company but I was asked this...at a company that does tax software. The second feeling elitism is by far the more dangerous. Elitism is dangerous in any job or walk in life as it implies hubris to the extent that you feel that you're better than everybody else. This leads to resentment from your fellow workers, you trying less to make yourself better because you think you're already the best, and a general unprogressive attitude. Programmers are especially susceptible to this because of the nature of our work. We deal with science. We may not be mixing chemicals in beakers but we are dealing with complex ideas to accomplish high level tasks and a lot of companies acknowledge this. Programming teams will be in the Research and Development section or be in the famed software corner and will be drawn under a different light than a lot of the other parts of the company. 

Dealing with both of these problems can be done by taking a step back and reassessing. When you're feeling frightened about a programming interview or just a problem in general, breath and think about what it is you need to do. If you're still a few weeks out study, and get ready for the next interview every way that you can. If you study hard and write as much could as possible and you feel like you've put as much effort as you could had into it, then you succeed regardless of the result.
By pushing yourself to write code and read problems, you're forcing yourself to become a better programmer therefor your winning regardless of wether you get the job. The more programming practice that you do the more confident you're going to feel and eventually you'll start getting a lot of things right which leads me to elitism. 

When you're killing it and have an instant answer to every question, you're on top. You feel like nothing can bring you down because you can answer or handle any problem that comes your way and people come to you for answers. This is a great feeling but how you handle it can be a huge problem or a huge advantage for you depending on your choices. Allowing yourself to be unfriendly and full of yourself is going to drive others away from you and make managers dislike you and more importantly people won't help you.

If you're on top you probably are thinking that you don't need anybody's help but you do. You do so strongly and vehemently that you don't realize it right now because you can't fathom the problems that you don't know. People observe you everyday and when you're coding they observe your code because they need to be able to write code to work with yours and if they see something wrong with it or something that could be done more efficiently then you want them to tell you. If they strongly dislike you, chances are that they are going to want to see you crash and burn. Take a breath when you're feeling good and ask others what you could be doing to be even better and if nothing returns find things to make your self better.