Most Engineers Fail Interviews for This Reason

Key Takeaways

Being a good engineer is not just about knowing how to solve le code. >> Why did you leave Google? >> I was getting a bit more complacent. When I decided to leave, it was for three primary reasons. Software engineers believe that if you're a strong coder, you will succeed in tech. But once you're inside big tech, you realize coding is only a small part of what actually drives outcomes. Today, I'm talking to Maddie Zing. She's a senior software engineer formerly at Google. And if you're on Instagram, you know Maddie for sure through her content. In this conversation, we're going to talk about what real engineering looks like across different environments from small companies and big techs. I think the biggest myth is that you have to know the stack. I did not know the language. I did not know like how to use Django. I did not know TypeScript. With AI, it's it's just faster to prototype. Speed is very prioritized. >> Why these perks change our behaviors as software engineers? It definitely makes your life very convenient. And how compensation and promotion actually work at places like Google compared to Meta. Maddie and I had a a bit of a bed. I thought Google pays more. I looked up the numbers. And finally, what interview advice works and does not work from the perspective of insiders. Let's talk about interviews. The interview is not just you arriving at a correct solution. It's about showing the interviewer how you think. >> Let's get into it. Welcome to the channel. My name is Jean and today we have Maddie. You've probably seen her through Instagram. She's big on Instagram and I'm so excited to have her here. Thanks for being on the channel. >> Thank you for having me. I'm really excited to talk to y'all. Let's get right into it. So, first question I had. I've looked at your profile on LinkedIn. I noticed that you did something that no one else I've ever seen has done. So, you've done like everything through tech. You've gone through 10 different internships. You did Amazon, IBM, Microsoft, Morgan Stanley, and so many more. So after seeing all these different operating system and different setup for work, what do you think is the biggest myth that software engineers don't really understand? >> Like you said, I've definitely gone through the gauntlet. I tried a lot of different things like startups, midsize companies, big companies, research. I think the biggest myth is that you have to know the stack and you have to be familiar with the technology they're using in the internship. In basically all of my internships and when I started full-time at Google, I did not know the language. I did not know like how to use Django. I did not know TypeScript. I learned that all on the job. And that's totally normal and that's totally acceptable. A lot of companies, especially for internship and new grad roles, are really targeting more so like, oh, your your potential and your ability to learn on the job rather than like, oh, do you already have the skills of a new grad engineer who is sufficient in Python and Django and things like that. >> Yeah, I love that. That's why I love internships. I always recommend internships for all students. >> I did learn a lot at my school, but I would say I learned a lot of stuff just on the job, coding, debugging. >> So, let's zoom out a bit. Looking back at all the things that you've tried before going to Google, what was your most favorite environment? >> So, I've greatly enjoyed every single opportunity I've had. Um, I would say by a little bit, my favorite one was when I was interning at Microsoft. Uh, so specifically at Microsoft, I was on the Zamron team. Um, Zamron used to be a startup before it got acquired from Microsoft. So, I really really enjoyed that environment because it was kind of in my opinion the best of both worlds of big tech and startup. It had all the perks, the stability of Microsoft, but it also had like the people, the culture, and how fast it moved for a startup. So, what I mean by that is like we shipped very fast. Um, people were from all over the world because it was when it was a startup, everyone was remote. So, I had a lot of different perspectives. Um, also we had like I love board games. We would have weekly board game nights and we have like wine and cheese. And fun fact, that particular team was in Microsoft New England office and it was the only team in the office that actually gave two free lunches a week. >> I don't think any of the other teams got free lunch. We had free snacks. >> So Microsoft doesn't give you lunch. >> Not in New England. I think in base in the campus in Seattle they might. But was really funny is you could tell like every you know twice a week our team would all of a sudden be like 30 extra people. People would just like walk down and like catch up and grab the food. It was actually in the acquisition contract when they got acquired by Microsoft which is which is why they kept it. >> I see. Yeah, I can totally relate to that. When WhatsApp got acquired by Meta, we had all kinds of different policy for us like we had special chairs. >> Like we were using a very particular Herman Miller chair that we only we were allowed to use. >> Wait, so someone else couldn't bring their own Herman Miller into the office? >> Well, you can bring your own, but we didn't bring our own. We have different policy and that's why I kind of like startup within a big tech ecosystem. You get the best of both worlds. >> Yeah, 100%. >> That actually leads us right into the next question about perks. Google has one of the best perks, the food, the the coffee you mentioned, all kinds of other perks that they offer. You were there for four years, but you quit recently. Tell us about that. Why did you leave Google? >> Yeah. Um, when I started Google, I never thought I would leave. like you mentioned, there's a lot of cool perks. I was like, "Oh, like all my friends are on campus. I have free food, free coffee, massages, uh free laundry, all that jazz." However, I did realize that I was getting a bit more complacent as time went on. Like there's this concept of golden handcuffs where because the perks are so good and because the comp is like quite good, it's it's really hard to leave. However, when I decided to leave, it was for three primary reasons. Um the first one was just I always uh first and foremost am a learner. I want to learn and I had learned a lot at Google and I was still learning. I had been at two teams at Google, one in search and one in ads. Um, but I did feel like it came to a point where I thought I could try a different company, different stack. I also know a lot of people in big tech leave around like 2 to four years in. So when I left, I was by no means um someone who left early. I think that my tenure there's like an internal site where you can look at what percent of people join after you and when I left it was like 85%. So I'd been there for quite some time for a big tech employee. Um so first it was just like wanting to learn and wanting to develop as an engineer. Um the second was while I did really like what I was working on at Google um I'll say Google like a lot of big tech companies maybe meta is a lot of internal databases and internal systems. So what that means is some of what I was doing day-to-day wasn't actually applicable outside of Google and I was like afraid that if I wanted to leave really suddenly at some time or if I got laid off it would take a while for me to become interview ready. So then I decided that perhaps the best thing for my career was just to try something new and um try to learn like for example we didn't use React so I learned React. um are also our like system is very search specific and ad specific. So it's not something that I could really show in like a system design interview for example. So when I left I relearned a lot of the system design concepts that I knew but had never really used at Google to be honest. And the third reason, this one is the less serious reason. A lot of my friends left and I'm like the kind of girl it's like if my friends jumped off a bridge would you jump off? Yes, because I trust my friends and they have good instincts and good reasons to do so. But I realized that when I when my friends left, they also seemed like they were learning a lot and really happy in their new teams. And I was like, "Oh, maybe I should consider this." And also, I like I mentioned used to hang out a lot with my friends on campus and built a lot of my friendships around that. I was terrified for the longest time that if I left, I would just all of a sudden have no access to that ecosystem. However, when my friends left and we would still be friends and I would still see them around, I realized that, oh, even if I leave, it's not like the end of all my friendships. I can still hang out with people outside of work. It's hard, but I can do it. So, yeah, those three reasons were the main reasons why I ended up leaving Google despite not wanting to do so at all when I started. >> These perks are meant to be there to support us to be better engineers. But do you think the perks change us? >> Yeah, 100%. When I started at Google, I remember distinctly we had this team building exercise on virtually where we had to draw something. I did not own a pen. So literally I muted my I turned off my camera, muted and then drove to the the Google office 3 minutes away to grab a pen and go back. Similarly, I also never owned a printer. So I would have to go to the office. Um I will say that it definitely makes your life very convenient. Um, so for example, having free breakfast, lunch, dinner means that I don't have to worry about paying for food or going out and grabbing food and makes it so I can work longer at the office. Um, coffee means that I don't have to worry about being able to focus. Fun fact, when I left Google, I was feeling horrible for a couple weeks. And I learned that it's because I was literally experiencing caffeine withdrawal cuz I never drank coffee or tea regularly before Google. And it kind of made my body literally dependent on caffeine. You didn't have coffee at home. >> Yeah. I was like, why do I feel like so bad? I was like googling the symptoms. I was like, oh. And then I bought tea and it fixed itself. But for a while, I was like, this is stuff that was so like built into my routine. It never occurred to me that it would need I would need to take care of this on my own. Um, but to to answer your question, um, I think those perks were wonderful while I was at Google. Um I do think that it is better for me as a person and a real adult to learn how to like you know deal with food and gym and other stuff myself. Um I even like furnished my apartment which was pretty bare while I was at Google because I would literally go to the office 7 days a week even on the weekends mostly for the gym but sometimes just to hang with friends or to do a little bit of work. So, it's definitely a big change in my lifestyle, but it is one that I I think I would have had to make at some point. And I I am happy that I dealt with it earlier rather than later on in my life. >> Maddie and I had a a bit of a bet. We had a bet on who pays more, Google versus Meta, and Maddie said Meta pays more. And I was like, I thought Google pays more. And Maddie totally won because I looked up the numbers. And for L3, Google base is 150K whereas Meta is 155. And add on stock and bonus, you come to 195 for Google and 220 for Meta. That's pretty significant actually. >> And then for L4 versus E4 at Meta. So L4 at Google is 320K versus E4 at Meta is 360. So the gap closes at L4. So the reason why I thought Google pays more is when I was a hiring manager, every time I try to give out offers to engineers, every now and then they would have a competing offer for from Google and it was slightly higher every time giving out higher offer when they knew that they had a competing offer from Meta. >> Yeah. >> So I think that's where my my data came from. But what do you think? Do you think these numbers um sound pretty close in your experience? Well, I can't say firsthand for the Meta uh numbers because I never work for Meta, but for Google 100%. I'm also totally aligned when you said that um Google does give competing offers if they know other companies are interested in you since I'll say um for example, when me and my friends when we were deciding whether to take the offer or not, the recruiter was like, "Oh, send me any competing offers you want. You can obviously block out the names and the personal information, but just we want the the PDF of the offer itself." So, I'm pretty sure they would use that to guide how much they would actually offer me. And I did have friends who joined um only had Google as their offer and definitely got paid less than the friends who joined at around the same time who had competing offers. That's that's really interesting because every time people ask me, Gene, how should I negotiate? I say, well, the best way to negotiate is to have competing offers. Otherwise, you're not really negotiating if you have no leverage. You're actually just begging for for a bigger number. There's no reason for them to give you a bigger number if unless you have a competing offer. >> Yeah, for sure. And I I do think Google um maybe Meta too, they do have like kind of your typical base number. Like the base salary, I understand especially for new grads is pretty much non-negotiable, but what can change is the equity that you get. So, uh my friends like we all got the same base, but we got various different amounts of equity depending on the competing offers that we had to be honest. That's interesting because here it says uh for for new grads L3 base is 150K but the stock it can be up to four 45K a year times 4 that's like over 200k so that can be a pretty significant difference. Yeah, and also equity is not liquid. So I know that Meta and Google has had their ups and downs, but I know that my Google stock when I actually have not sold I actually have held it, but currently it's valued a lot more than the just like the the number I was given. So when I joined Google, this was in 2020. Um my stock was 1,600, but this was before the stock split, so the equivalent of 80 per share. And now it's 338 per share. >> So four times. >> Yeah. So, my Meta share I think during the acquisition our shares were around like $79 and now it's $725. >> Wow. Crazy. >> Yeah. I mean, obviously I I I didn't hold on to all of my shares. I have been selling them over the years. I got mine in like 2015, so I've been selling a little bit every single year. Um, but yeah, some of the shares I still do have is up a lot. >> I see. Yeah. I I not financial advice. I probably should sell. Um because I think one of my friends made the excellent point where if you were given that money as cash, if you weren't going to invest it all in your company, you should probably diversify and sell. I was just too lazy to set up auto sale to be honest. Um but yeah, I think for me personally, I just kind of think of my equity as like paper money. I'm like if it just goes poof, goes to zero, I'll be totally fine. I don't bank and plan assuming I have that money. >> It's also easier for you to sell now that you have left Google. So there's less restrictions for you. >> Oh yeah. Yeah. The trading windows and everything. Yeah. >> And good good point on your friend. You should listen to your friends. Really? >> Yeah. Probably. Yes. Friends know the best. >> Yeah. We talked about the different compensation between L3 and L4. Let's also talk about the transition from L3 to L4. You mentioned before that your mentors helped you out immensely. Before going into the details, let's talk about what the promotion process looks like from the inside. >> Different companies obviously have different promotion processes. At Google specifically, it's quite uh rigid. We have promotion opportunities twice a year uh baked into the standard uh performance review cycles. Uh when you think that you're ready for promotion, you'll talk to your manager and then if your manager agrees, they will put you up for promotion. So, what that means is you and your manager will work together to create a self- assessment document or assessment document where you and your manager talk about here are like all the projects I launched, here's the impact, here's difficulty. They'll also gather a peer review. So, um, usually a bit senior engineers that you've worked with will vouch hopefully for your process and be like, "Oh, this person should be uh promoted, should be a mid-level or senior candidate, and because of XYZ um, and I worked with them on this project, I can vouch." And then this all goes to promotion committee. So, the promotion committee is usually quite senior engineers and managers in the org that you're at. They will take all of the candidates packets one by one. They'll go through them. they'll discuss like the pros and cons um and then in the end they will decide who gets promoted and who does not. So this entire process is quite lengthy but I would say personally I think it's very unbiased. It makes it so that multiple people have to vouch for you have to like make sure that you are performing at the level. So you can't just like know someone like know a hiring manager or like a manager to get promoted and then it takes a couple months and then afterward you get your result whether you got promoted or not. Something that I think Google does very well is even if you don't get promoted, you get feedback from the committee. So the committee can be like, "Oh, we think you're very close. However, you need to do XYZ." So if you do XYZ the next cycle, you can put yourself in promotion again and then if you have accomplished those items, you're much more likely to get promoted. >> So is it common for people to try more than once or is it usually like after a couple of times you usually get it? I would say 100% a lot of people try multiple times before getting promoted. Um I will say especially when it comes to the higher levels when you're going from L3 new grade to L4 mid-level usually you just need to submit like some number of PRs show some impact and it's pretty straightforward. When you get to the higher levels getting promoted is not just about how you are as an engineer. It's also about your business impact or about um if your or to be honest has budget to promote you. So there's a lot of different things that are out of your control at the higher levels that might not get you promoted through no fault of your own. So I know many really good engineers who needed multiple attempts to get promoted to L5 senior L6 staff. >> And do you normally discuss this with your manager? Like your manager has to be on board in order for you to apply to even be promoted. >> Yeah. So at Google, your manager explicitly has to uh put you up for promotion. I have actually some of my friends have had managers who've said like I don't think you're ready but if you think you're ready I will put you up. Um however the manager is very critical in helping the committee decide if you get promoted or not. So if your manager is not on board and doesn't understand the impact or doesn't believe you have the impact, it's hard to convince the committee because you yourself are not in that committee. It's just the managers and the senior engineers and like the leadership. >> Yeah. Having been in these um what are they called? >> Promo committees. >> The the promo committees, I can tell you that if the manager is not fighting for you, you're probably not going to get the promotion. >> Yeah. Cuz like managers do have incentive to promote their report. So if you if your manager isn't fighting for you, but your sister manager is fighting for their reports, it's much more likely the sister manager will get the promotion. Listening to your description of Google promotion cycle, I think it's a bit of a hybrid between what I saw at IBM and Meta. Meta is a little bit um more grassroot and IBM was a little bit more comprehensive and I think Google is somewhere in between. >> I do think anecdotally I feel like my friends at Meta have gotten promoted faster more so than my friends at Google and part of it is probably like the process a bit more streamlined. I actually saw research around this. Um, so at Meta, you don't have to apply. You don't have to show interest in promotion. The manager will decide for you. And I actually saw research around this like especially when you're more junior, you're maybe less confident about your ability. So, you're less likely to ask for a promotion actively and that might slow you down more. >> I I have a story about that. So, actually, when I got promoted, I did not think I was ready. My manager actually put me up for promotion. She like was like, "I think you should go promotion. I think you're ready." The reason I think is because um my or had explicitly sent out an email being like, "Hey, women tend to ask for promotion later and less than men." So, if you have a report, they like if you have a report who isn't putting themselves out there, but you think they do deserve to go for promo, you should do that. So, I think my manager saw that email and then thought of me and then put me up for promotion. So very grateful to my org for starting the conversation and for my manager for following up on that conversation because I don't think I would have put myself up I would not have put myself up there that cycle. >> So you were really lucky your manager was mindful of that. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> It's important to have good managers. >> Yeah 100%. Like I think especially at big companies like managers can make or break your experience. >> Totally. Yeah. A lot of people assume that promotions are just about doing great work but that doesn't always apply right. >> Yeah 100%. Um obviously to get promoted you need to do good engineering work as an IC but there is so much more to that. Um Google specifically does have like a very rigid template where they have like oh you need to show like technical difficulty leadership impact scope and in order to fulfill in order to get promoted you have to fulfill all of those categories for the next level. So it's not just about submitting like XPRs and shipping these features. You also have to get buyin for example from higher up engineers. You have to communicate with nontechnical stakeholders to make sure that they're okay with the product. Um I will say like I personally have been on products where we were very close to being engineering complete. However, we just didn't get like a certain approval and then we had to go back to the drawing board and like just implement something completely different and that did slow down, you know, the launch cycle and thus the promotion cycle. So just being able to communicate and show scope and getting buyin from senior engineers who can then vouch for your promotion is I would say as important if not more so especially in the upper levels compared to your engineering work. >> That's that totally makes sense. Like having been in these uh performance reviews that's what we call meta. Um it's so much easier like as a hiring manager of course I want to promote my engineers right but as a hiring manager it's not really up to me. I not a hiring M as a software engineer manager. It's not up to me, right? I need to get buy in from other all the other managers who are also in the meeting. And if they all know about how great Maddie is, then it's going to make the conversation so much easier. So really, the best way for you to help your manager help you get promoted is to help other people also understand the impact of your work. >> Yeah. And also something that I didn't realize until like a bit later is it's not just about doing good work. It's about also picking projects that will get you promoted since a lot of the time, like you mentioned, um even if you do great on a project, if it's not high visibility, the leadership and the other managers will have no idea what you're working on. So, it helps if your manager is okay with it to try to pick impactful projects that have like high visibility. >> Also, maybe they don't care about the project, right? You you did something really great you thought was great. Not saying you, but like I do hear from a lot of junior engineers, they work on some project they thought was really important and it turns out no one else cares about it. >> Yeah. And I will say like as a junior engineer, it's also really hard to figure out to be honest like what those good projects are. So yeah, definitely I think in order to get promoted you have to do like a lot of research beforehand like way before the cycle. >> Yeah. And also again it helps if your manager helps you out selecting the projects too. >> Yeah, for sure. Yeah. So Maddie and I were talking and Maddie mentioned that Google is very heavy on design doc. They're very design doc focused whereas meta I think is very workplace focused. So workplace is a tool that meta uses. It's just like Facebook where you have your own profile. So you have like internal profile and then everyone can post but like every org has their own Facebook group. So there's like a workplace group for um your team and then your org and then the entire Facebook. Everyone's always posting their work on these groups like hey like this is a project that I'm working on. They might credit other engineers or talk about different challenges and then other people can comment on it. It's kind of like social media but for work. So at Meta, people who are always overcommunicating about like what great impact they're creating through their projects and progress usually get a lot of visibility because everyone's reading these posts and I have noticed people who do communicate a lot on these uh posts usually get promoted faster as well. And you've mentioned um Google is very design doc focused. So by design when you are so focused on writing design docs that type of engineering culture has influence on the type of risks that the company takes. So let's talk about that. >> Like you mentioned because Google has such a heavy design doc process. I think often times um probably different to what you were experienced at meta people tend to like try to get all the approvals before starting a lot of the engineering work. Uh so for example like I mentioned I had projects that were postponed or cancelled because we didn't get approvals initially. Um so I think just like having the design doc first before uh doing engineering work makes it so if leadership is not okay with it usually like they'll cut it before the engineer has to spend time and effort into writing the engineering code. Um, I will say that since I left Google, I do believe that they've been a little more happy to take risks is with all the AI stuff. Um, because one, I guess like with AI, it's it's just faster to prototype. So even if you like build something, if you vibe code it, it doesn't work, it's fine. And two, with the AI race and everything, um, speed is very prioritized. So my old team at Google, um, we were health search. Health is a very sensitive, um, vertical. So as a result when I was there I do think that there were a lot of things that we just couldn't do because Google wasn't able or willing to take the risk. I think now they have relaxed that a little bit. I do see more experimental AI features with health related queries that to be honest would not have flown back in my old or when I was there like then this was three years ago. This was my first team at Google before I moved to ads. There's a reason for that because that's interesting. I just saw an article. This news article was saying that the number one source of all the AI answers that Google is providing on search is coming from YouTube. >> Oh, so what's >> so like theoretically like I as a software engineer on YouTube can give out health um advice and it might make it into the search search results for health queries on Google. Yeah, I I will say yeah, I think back when we were there, I think everything was very much not AI like it was like we were very careful about what queries triggered and what information we gave. Um >> to be fair to Google, I think a lot of companies for example like I know uh OpenAI has recently launched like chatb health. So I think the industry in general is shifting toward a model of health that is a bit more forgiving for you know health risks um in general is what I think. So I don't think it's just Google. I think a lot of companies are trying to just like tap into that space while still keeping users safe. But it's definitely a very >> I would say it's a hard line to balance. >> So when you are working in this type of environment, what type of engineers do you think will are more likely to struggle? >> I think that in a environment that values like design docs and getting approvals and collaboration as much as Google does, engineers that are maybe good coders but just do not communicate will struggle a lot. And this is because at Google, not just for per uh not just for um promotion, but also for performance reviews and for just landing features, you really need a lot of like meetings, a lot of like buyin from leadership. Um a lot of like back and forth, like you know, pros and cons, analysis, like everything. And if you happen to be someone who's not as good or not as willing to communicate and communicate frequently during the process, it is much more likely even if you do great engineering work that your feature will be blocked or delayed because of some approval or some like thing later on in the in the pipeline. Switching gears a little bit, let's talk about interviews. I think this is a topic that most people are going to be interested in. When you left Google, you started the job search process all over again. But while at Google, you also were interviewing other candidates who were trying to apply to Google. So, let's talk a little bit about the the different sides of interviewing. If you can recall the first time you ever interviewed a candidate for Google, what was that like? What was the biggest surprise? >> I think the biggest surprise for me was that I was actually really nervous. Like I thought like, oh, you know, this is like totally chill. like I no longer have to solve le code problems. I can watch other people. However, I was like stressed. I was like, "Oh my gosh, I have to make sure I give the candidate hints if they get stuck. I have to make sure I remember like what they were doing, their thought process so I can write a good um debrief afterward." And I was just like very very very stressed. And this was even after I had done like a shadow interview um where I had sat in while someone else interviewed a candidate like because we you have to do that in order to become an interviewer. But for my first one where I was flying solo, I did not realize how stressful it was for me. Um, also I would say after the fact when I was writing the debrief, I was also very conflicted in a way because I was not 100% sure like what I was supposed to write and I wasn't sure if I was being too harsh in the judging and in the grading. It was surprisingly stressful for me. But as I gave more interviews became easier and easier >> because you needed more data point to understand, okay, this is a good candidate versus not so great. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. >> On the flip side, is there something a candidate does during an interview that makes you instantly trust them? >> If a candidate is very communicative, it makes me instantly trust them. Um, I've been with candidates where even if they arrived at the correct solution in the end, they would spend like, you know, a minute just like in silence kind of like coding or trying to think about things. They wouldn't talk through what they were thinking. The reason why it's so important to talk, I would say, consistently throughout the interview is because um the interview is not just you arriving at a correct solution, it's about showing the interviewer how you think. So, what that means is if you are even if you're not sure how to get started, if you just like kind of give the interviewer a glimpse into your thoughts, they can help guide you. They can tell you if you're barking up the wrong tree, they can tell you if you're on the right path. And I found that invaluable as both an interviewer and as an interviewee for communicating. Being a good engineer is not just about knowing how to solve le code. It's also about um just like having a good thought process. And I think especially at Google and other companies too, we're not just looking for has the candidate arrived at the right solution. We're also looking for oh how is the candidate think? Is this like a candidate that I think would make a good teammate who can communicate? And I think that's something that some candidateses don't realize when they are interviewing. They think that if they can describe the right solution, everything is good. >> So that that's a really good point. So after learning about all these things being an interviewer and then you went through the job search process again. So did that help you or change you in any way when you were going through the process for the second time? >> Yeah, it definitely helped me. Um I was more acutely aware of how important it is to kind of like keep the interviewer in your in your loop when you're thinking. So I was talking a lot during the process when I was interviewing for other companies. Um yeah, I also found specifically system design um is very very important that you talk throughout and you enumerate like the trade-offs that you're deciding on and you you ask the interviewer like hey is this like kind of how like I should approach it since I think some interviewers especially for a system designer they really much prefer like one method over another. So if you don't ask them early on they might just like not like your design in general. Yeah, it's it's important to talk about the pros and cons to really like think through the problem. I feel like people who are really chatty do really well on these interviews. Like genu generally like I'm not super chatty. Like I am more of an internal thinking type of person where I like to like meditate or journal. But people who are more outwardy seem to really thrive in these interview questions. >> You seem pretty chatty. I don't know. >> I'm an introvert. >> Oh, you are? Unless it's board games. Board games I will play with anyone, but I am INTJ. >> Oh, okay. >> But yeah, like I force myself to be a bit more chatty when it comes to interviews because I know it's useful. >> Same. Same here. It's It is a skill that you can learn even if you're naturally not good at it. >> Yeah, for sure. >> Well, speaking of asking questions and answering, we can do some rapid fire questions. I have 10 questions here and you can just answer the first thing that comes to your mind. Don't dig too much into it. We'll just do quick answers. Okay. Go. >> Okay. Ready? >> Excited. >> Okay. Startup or big tech? >> Big tech. >> Uh generalist or specialist? >> Specialist. >> Remote or in person? >> In person. >> Um backend or front end? >> Backend. >> You said in person. Introverted people usually prefer remote. >> Oh, I'm more productive in the office. So, I actually I work remote now, but I have a co-working space subscription specifically so I can be in a officey environment. >> That makes sense. I was just curious. Okay, next one. Python or Java? >> Python. >> Same here. Uh, tabs or spaces? This is a spicy one. Be careful here. >> Tabs. Don't hate me. >> Um, async or meetings? >> Me. Oh, sorry. Async. >> Coffee or tea? >> Tea. >> Whiteboard interviews. Are they outdated or still needed? >> Still needed. Will AI replace software engineers? >> Not quite. >> Not quite. >> Yeah, AI will replace or has already placed a lot of like repetitive coding tasks, but I believe that we'll always need software engineers or engineers to build the infra and train the AI. So, that's my answer. >> So, I have one last question. So, what's something that people are waiting for permission to pursue? Like maybe there's something holding them back to try something different. Yeah, I would say fear of failure is something that stops a lot of people from doing what they want, whether that's like getting a new job or getting promoted or or doing a startup or doing their passion project. Um, I personally when I was in university, my first year, I didn't apply to things until very late because I was like terrified of getting rejected and I did get rejected many times, but also I was like, "Oh, you know, I need like this extra class. I need like to put this on my personal portfolio. I need to brush up my resume." I never felt ready, but I've come to internalize as I've gotten older and gone through the industry. I do not think anyone really ever feels ready. It's just about taking that leap of faith. And sometimes you just you just got to go for it because I know it's cliche, but it's, you know, you miss like 100% of the shots you never take. Like if you don't like apply for that job, if you don't do your startup, if you don't like, you know, do your own thing, you'll never know what was. So I would just say no matter what kind of person you are, just like if even if you even if you don't think you're ready, just go for it. For example, if you're interviewing for jobs, if you fail your interview at your dream company, what you have like a cool down period of 6 months to a year, you can try again the next year. It to it's like totally doesn't matter. And if you get that job, then it's so much better than your status quo. So that is something that I still struggle with like the fear of failure and the fear of rejection. But I think I have powered through it enough such that like you mentioned, I've gotten like all these like big tech internships and I'm like very happy with where I am in my career. >> I I love that. Um I actually just posted this morning about hitting 100K on YouTube. Thank you. And um I almost never started YouTube because of the fear of judgment and fear of failure. And that's one of the reasons why I chose YouTube because you can be a little bit more anonymous on YouTube versus like LinkedIn. is very public and all my co-workers will read my posts. But yeah, I think it that's something that is applicable for a lot of different parts of your life that a lot of people can probably relate to. >> Yeah, definitely. Yeah. I think like sometimes I feel like the worst enemy of what you're trying to do is actually yourself. cuz I feel like I personally just always have a lot of sometimes like anxiety, sometimes just like overthinking and the things that I've accomplished despite that made me realize like if I just had this attitude my entire life, I'd probably be better at what I do and where I am. But I'm I'm very happy with where I am and I'm very happy with how things have gone. Just like, you know, sharing some life lessons that I wish I had known myself when I was younger. >> Yeah. Thank you so much for being here. This was great. >> Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah. Thank you. Bye.