A Dump, v1
Time to regroup. #
I’ve been mondo busy with work, and so unable to take a moment to get my ducks in a row and take stock of where I’ve been at - now that things have slowed down a touch, it seems like the perfect time to do a bit of a brain dump.
So, some things I’ve been thinking about recently:
I’m feeling a lot of career anxiety. I suspect that most people in positions like mine feel similarly. There is a lot of pressure as a person who works in software engineering to constantly be learning, worrying about upcoming technology, getting better at collaborating, expanding your network, keeping up to date with the software/solutions/workflows the industry currently likes, doing Leetcode and trying to actually learn/understand how to implement and when/why/how one should use a certain data structure/algorithm over another (this is going quite poorly), maintaining relationships with and replying to every dang recruiter that reaches out… Surely, every career, and especially ones that are fairly lucrative, comes with its caveats, and I oughtn’t imply that I think I’m carrying around a heavier stress sack than than most people, as I certainly do not and am not. This being said, the sack has weighed heavily on me recently, and I am tired.
This is connected to the last point - I recently had what was essentially my first partially technical interview with a company that excited me, and I bombed pretty hard. It hit my ego pretty dang good. Now, I did, as the interviewer kindly informed me, about a 7.5 out of 10 job on the coding portion (humbly, I’ll admit my failings - I blanked on what “static” means in a method/variable declaration, and straight up couldn’t answer what things get stored on the stack vs. the heap in memory at execution time), but I performed abysmally on the support portion, which I was entirely unprepared for; I wasn’t informed that the position would primarily be support. I made a fool of myself trying to answer what I should do/check if a program was suddenly taking up waaay more RAM than than usual (homeslice was looking for me to talk about ways to diagnose a memory leak, he would go on to tell me, which wasn’t even partially as complicated as I was making it out to be). I 100% didn’t know the answer, and looking back, I obviously should have said as much rather than babble incoherently. It seems clear that getting good at big boy IT job interviews will take a lot more practice than I have had thus far, which is annoying.
Again, tangentially related to the last point, in making (wrong) preparations for this interview, I spent hours researching the types of questions I could expect and trying to memorize the answers to questions that people reported seeing on that company’s glassdoor profile. This revealed to me, basically, the whole world of Leetcode and similar services, which I am just really not great at. It’s an odd, competetive world that deals overwhelmingly in abstracts and theory, which I am finding doesn’t come naturally to me at all as a very practical, grounded person. Like, hours and hours of Googling later, I could still not really tell you how to deduce that a program’s time complexity is
O(log n), or say definitively that any given problem would be best solved with a reverse linked list or binary tree or DFS or sliding window or divide-and-conquer or whatever - I have a mountain of learning in front of me if I ever want to be a decent code-abstract solver, which is, again, annoying.Unrelated, I hate this infernal keyboard and I want to invest in a nice ergonomic-type mechanical keyboard but they are too dang costly. I’ll just be hitting the backspace literally every time I hit the spacebar in the meantime, I guess.
Kind of the root issue of all the above points is the fact that every programmer on the planet who doesn’t work for a FAANG/MAMAA company is feeling major FOMO at all times (heck, those folks are probably feeling it too). Since (and, to a lesser extent, before) the whole “Great Resignation” thing, us code folks feel the need to be constantly restless for the next incrementally better job, lest we deprive ourselves of opportunity. Unlike the majority of careers, which reward loyalty and sticking it out at a single employer for years and years, our career path rewards enterprising lone wolves that gracefully hop from job to job on a 1 year cycle or whenever they perceive their current job as being a dead end, a sinking ship, or just uninteresting or not challenging. On a theoretical level it seems like this is a good thing, and mostly results in making lots of connections, not being tied down, and making nice jumps in benefits and salary on the regular, which is more than can be said of a lot of careers. But in my experience, I just mostly feel disconnected and unsettled at all times, stressed from the constant pressure to be job hunting every single day, worried that staying at one place for any extended period of time will atrophy the skills that will get me hired elsewhere, and guilty that I’ve not been able to progress as fast in my career as other folks I encounter on the internet. I recognize that a lot of this is self-inflicted and/or mitigatable, but being in control of one’s feelings and shielding one’s self from outside influence is such a hard part of being human and I struggle deeply with it.
I’ve recently discovered Jon Skeet and his content - the guy’s knowledge and body of work is staggering, and I find his work inspiring, practical, and thought-provoking. I highly recommend checking his stuff out, especially so if you make software and especially especially so if you work with C#. I’d like to change my approach to blogging a bit to reflect something more similar to his, even if the only result is that I produce more things, and produce things that are useful and reflect reality.
In order to push myself in the creation of content department, I’d like to blog my way through solving Leetcode problems whenever I can. That seems good. I’ll make a new tag for that.
I want to increase my online presence and perhaps even get some eyes on this blog, but not in an influencer-y type of way, and not in a way that robs me of what little free time I have - I’m hoping, in whatever free moments I can find, that I can use my stupid random fact base program to make a twitter bot. Stay tuned for a blog discussing its creation.
This probably isn’t very meaningful to anybody other than myself, but even if it’s in a self-indulgent way, I have produced something, and that’s at least a better way to spend my time than sitting and stressing about junk I have little control over. Perhaps it will help me live in the moment a little better. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯