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WEEK 0: Begin self reflection & choose a language

Week ZERO Video

Learning Objectives

  1. Understand the implications of language choice
  2. Understand the trade offs between languages in making your choice for your bigtech interview
  3. Be able to confidently decide on a language
  4. Understand the implications of the workplace culture you're targeting
  5. Reflect on the life that you want to have for yourself
  6. articulate your motivations for professional development
  7. Codify a set of goals for the program

Discussion questions

  1. What are the benefits of choosing a language that you already know?
  2. What are the advantages of choosing a language your target already uses in production?
  3. Technical interviews will require a low level understanding of how your language works from a hardware perspective. What does that mean for us?
  4. Big tech often operates on a metrics-driven culture. What does that mean?
  5. What is "hustle culture"?
  6. How might this impact your enjoyment of your employment? Family life? Consider total-life-happiness.
  7. What are your goals?
    • Compensation?
    • Challenge?
    • Prestige?

Reading and Research

There's a lot of video content here, remember that you can watch or listen at 2x speed! Don't waste your time listening to people deliver information in slow-mode! You're here to work dammit!

Language reference

Refresher topics in memory

Total life happiness & burnout

Pricing yourself and negotiation

Homework

  1. Choose a big-tech company and do some research into the languages they use in production. Submit a comment with your findings here: #1 try to check the existing comments to reduce duplication. The end goal of this assignment is to compile a validated list of the best languages to learn with respect to having the broadest appeal to big tech companies. These values will be compiled into a spreadsheet where we can gather stats on which are the most used by faang and which are the ones that are used by the companies you actually want. The language you choose MAY be on the intersection of those lists.
  2. Research the mechanics of how your chosen language allocates memory at a system level
    • consider sending a PR with a summary and research notes to help others I've started some C# research here you might choose rust, golang, javascript, ruby, whatever it'd be super helpful to have that research be more accesisble.
  3. Search for a FAANG company online and find any published information about their company values. Share your findings here: #2 again, check the list before you start to help avoid duplication of effort. We're going to be looking to (again) find the overlaps while focussing on the values in place at the companies we're targetting.
  4. Optional (& warning super toxic website): read some posts on https://www.teamblind.com/ about workplace cultures at your targetted shops. Anonymous but validated posts by employees at the actual companies in question. Make sure that they're the types of places that you want to be. Consider discussions about work life balance. Code interviews in big tech are said to be the hardest and most gruelling there are. The point of studying for the hardest of the hard code interviews may not even be to get the big tech job. If you can be confident in a Google interview there's every possiblity that you'll ace anywhere else in the world with your eyes closed.
  5. Optional Take up listening to podcasts in professional development. (Consider submitting great professional development resources to #2) some places to start:
    • Front End Happy Hour Ryan Burgess is a Senior Software Engineering Manager at Netflix and has regular discussions with his peers on general topics in development. (Estimating, non-CS backgrounds, documentation)
    • Soft Skills Engineering I like the subject lines, they have a really cute logo. I'm going to subscribe to this one tonight. Will delete if it sucks, but dat logo doe. How could anything with a logo that cute be bad?
    • LGTM: shipit OK ok ok ok... YES this is the audio version of my youtube channel. No. It isn't as good as the previous two (and I haven't even listened to the second one yet). Maybe one day. In the meantime, subscribe on your podcast platform of choice and set it to auto download new episodes. I do think the stories we get are pretty enjoyable and deliver wisdom in engineering and career management, but you're also welcome to download and delete - the analytics trigegr wither way! HA HA HA.

Start planning for the behavioral interviews in week 0 - every company has a motto, vision and set of values that they "secretly" look for in every interview. For example, one of amazon's values is "frugality" if you can start drilling the values of your target into your head in week zero, you should be haighly practised at surfacing samples of your matching behaviors by the time your interview rolls around.