I WENT VIRAL AFTER MY SECOND POST
With over 800K views and over 2K direct messages, here is what I learned
Earlier this summer, I went viral on LinkedIn. Probably one of the weirdest things to have happened to me for a few reasons.
For one, I‘m not a fan of LinkedIn, mostly because I believe LinkedIn puts employers in a position to be too biased. This is coming from a guy who has Googled images of “professional white people” to use as my profile photo and changed my name to be more white-sounding. I know… very
unhealthy practices.
Secondly, social media is a distraction, and I can’t tolerate distractions or subconscious influences I didn’t agree to.
Again, this was only my second post. My first post was about a white paper I read on system architecture.
However, this has taught me a ton! For example, I did not know LinkedIn caps your total connections to 30,000.
But this experience has truly changed my view on social media, I’ve learned that there’s some good, and there’s some bad. This one being of good and is one of the very reason I started writing on Medium.
I received a ton of messages and connections with real people seeking real-world advice, encouragement, and just someone who’d be willing to listen. For me, this is what made it stick for me.
So here it is, below, I share some of the questions people sent me and my responses. Enjoy!
Did you get a degree in this field?
Not really, my degrees are in Mathematics and Economics. Technical in nature so it wasn’t a huge learning curve when I started teaching myself the languages.
How did you decide to go into the computer science field?
For me it was about impact. Tech allows me to have the largest impact on the communities I serve.
Why you decide to get into IT industry?
Honestly, Tech kind of came to me. When I first started my career I was a statistician. At the time we had a client who needed a database management system and no one on our team knew how to build it so my lead suggested I do it. I taught myself a bunch and started working on it and really enjoyed it. From there I just kept learning and practicing to eventually becoming a software engineer.
What do you like the most about the field?
Building products people enjoy
What do you dislike about the field?
The lack of cultural diversity. I understand it but I’m just not a fan of it.
What areas of CS do you think will be in the most demand in the next 5 years?
Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence engineers
What skills besides the normal programming languages (e.g. HTML, CSS and JavaScript) do you think a web developer should have?
For web, I think you should be comfortable with some of the newer stacks companies are hiring for (Vue.js, React, Typescript, etc.)
What advice would you give to a beginner software developer just starting in the industry?
Keep building; never stop building and learning. Recruiters like to see portfolios. If you do not have one, you should make it soon.
Any tips to how you have gotten to the point of job interviews?
I put a lot of energy in my resume. Making sure the language resonated with industry and more importantly, it was results oriented with quantitative measures.
Do you have any advice on how to prepare for technical interviews with large tech companies?
Data structures and algorithms..If you are comfortable with the popular data structures (Hash, Linked List, Tress, etc) and algorithms (sort, merge sort, Bfs. DFS, etc) then I would spend time flushing out your approach to solving these type of problems. These things can be a hit or miss because if you’ve never seen the problem before it might be tough to crack in under 30 minutes. That said, practice practice practice. LeetCode is a really good resource for these. Also, for the “scalable” code part be sure to focus on DRY, and clean code. For myself, I like to say “ones code should read like a book.” Hope this helps and good luck!!
I was wondering what is your advice on answering the “Tell me about yourself” question. Essentially what are tips you have on selling myself as an impressive candidate.
I typically tell them what I’m passionate about, what motivates me, my working style (collaborative, independent), and where I want to be in the next few years as it relates to my career.
When they ask you why you want the job and what salary you are expecting how do you answer without seeming too naive or arrogant?
I always tie it back to my passions and the things that interest me. I never answer the salary question outright. I always say I expect a fair and competitive salary. Do your research before hand so when they do send you an offer the salary makes sense for your industry and experience. If they keep pushing tell them you’ll get back to them on your salary expectations. I’ve always said salary is the least of my concern because I’m more interested in fit and growth opportunities and I’ll have to circle back with them after I’ve done my research to gauge what’s a fair salary for this role.
How did you find a place that you know is accepting of diversity and has a community that generates growth? In other words, what questions did you ask employers to vet the company culture and environment?
This is a good one and hard to gauge sometimes. I use sites like Glassdoor to get a feel of the culture. Here is a list of some creative questions I’ve come across that address this is some way: Do people eat lunch together? Do you all contribute to charities? If so, how? What kind of culture do you all foster? How is that demonstrated? What does ongoing training look like? Do you all do internal trainings or provide reimbursements for external trainings?
Well, I wanted to start off by asking you how you managed to view your experiences of loss and sadness early on in life as strengths as opposed to weakness? How did you shift your perspective to see how you can own, leverage, and use it to your strength?
Simply put, perspective…I think people truly underestimate the power of the subconscious mind; from what you directly or indirectly consume and what you choose to focus your energy on has an inherent impact on your subconscious “engine” as I like to say.
How do you control what you directly and indirectly consume?
Love this question, for me I think about consumption from a few different channels:
- Audio
- Visual
- Literary
- Physical consumption
Basically, what I hear, see, read, and eat. Audio is probably the hardest to control. It has major indirect and direct implications. You ever hum a tune and can’t recall where you heard it? Things like that is what makes it hard. Especially, when dealing with people. You can’t control what they say so the next best thing is controlling who you are around.
This pretty much sums up most of my conversations worth sharing.
Pretty interesting, huh? Well, I hope you were able to learn something from my experience, and I encourage you to continue to be unapologetically you! The world needs it.
