It is that time of the year again! The time when I remember my blog and feel like writing something down once more!
As I all know, I was not looking forward to these last 6 months of university for a long time. But as it turns out, half of it was fine. We had 2 more "normal courses" and though they had their ups and downs I did not mind them and it was fun being back in school and meeting some friends again.
It was different coming back now though, so many people are not even bothering showing up to class anymore and it kind of helps me see why so few people are graduating this program every year, haha.
Anyway, down to the real reason why I am here: I got a job.
Searching for a job was a real pain in the a**, but I still feel like I came out on the other side quite quickly and unscathed, because I was expecting more months of this searching. Just a few days ago I made a plan for how to prepare for more coding tests and interviews, not knowing what skills or languages to focus on since there are so many different ones out there.
It all started with my finding out that people in my class had already started looking for jobs. This made me feel like I had to do the same, so mid January I sent out a bunch of applications to different jobs that seemed interesting to me. Many people called me back quite quickly and for a while there I had to go to so many interviews (in my opinion), that I felt like I had taken on too much at once and felt exhausted. But a lot of this stuff died down pretty quickly and I still had no job offers, so I was pretty much just waiting around, thinking I will apply for more jobs later on.
About a month or two later I applied for a few more but have gotten no answers from them so far. But I guess that doesnt matter any more, since I got offered a position quite quickly.
A recruiter set me up with a guy this Tuesday, we had a good interview, then he called me on Thursday and we talked a little more, and then on Friday they offered me the position and I took it.
That is very cool and all, and I feel like this will be a great place to work! However, this post is about the job searching process if anything. So here goes:
As a responsible adult, the first thing I did when I started to apply for jobs was to go out and buy some business casual attire to wear for interviews. Even I can't justify going to a job interview in a Legend of Zelda hoodie and my dirty broken Nike shoes. Even just wearing business casual still feels like dress-up to me though, I am not used to it, it doesn't feel like me.
Then I tried to prepare for the interviews, there are some normal non-programming related interview questions online that are commonly asked. Questions I got asked a lot were: "How do you work in a team/What role do you take in a team?", "How would people describe you?", "What are your best and worst qualities?", "Do you have any personal projects you are working on?", "Tell us about a project in school, what was difficult?" and so on.
In order to have some coding projects to show people at different companies I started working more on my writing website (made it look presentable) and made it public on GitHub. I also added another project in another language just in case.
I was afraid that everyone would ask technical questions, but most interviews were just about personality, background, school, etc. Then instead of being asked questions on spot about different programming langauges or skills, I would get sent an online coding test instead. This seems to be the norm at least now.
Most of these coding tests were not timed, but some were and I do not really get that, but that's another story. So for maybe 5 weeks in a row my weekends were largely spent on doing these code tests and I got pretty tired of them. Many days also working on my own website or websites it felt like a lot of work for not a lot of feedback from companies.
Of all the interviews I went to only one made me feel bad afterwards, most people were very nice.
I suppose the worst thing about search for a job for me was the uncertainty of everything, never really knowing if I knew enough or if I should study some other subject or just stick to what I already know. That's why I tried to make a list of what to study first, interview questions for Javascript or interview questions for Java? Backend or frontend questions? Algorithms or datastructures? Do I know enough or do I not? This whole process just really took a toll on my self esteem. Glad it's over for now.
Okay, this post does not have a lot of direction, but I'm going to end it here, because it's time to face the next struggle: Where the hell am I supposed to live in a few months?
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