The Results Are In...

An hour before I expected a call, my phone rang. I felt my heart racing and thumping through my chest. For the past four months, I have been spending all my nights practicing for interviews and applying for jobs everywhere I could, and this phone call would tell me whether or not I had passed the Google hiring committee. When I began my job hunting journey, I was optimistic. I went through a couple of on-sites, and I thought I did well in them, only to be rejected again and again.

"Hi, Andrew... I'm calling to let you know that Google has decided..." I remember at this point; time was time slowing down. I could feel myself waiting on the edge of my seat for every single word. "has decided to go with another candidate," I thought to myself. "To go ahead with the decision to hiring you. You've passed the hiring committee!".

Immediately a rush of emotions kicks into overdrive. I'm strangely overwhelmed with joy and relief that I can barely contain. I'm typically indifferent about a lot of things. But this was a feeling I had not felt in a long time. And that's when I realized, looking back, all the hard work I put into this effort was finally paying off. For me to have felt the achievement I was feeling required an equal amount of suffering.

What I'm Proud Of

I learned a new language, Python, and did all my coding interviews using it. In my opinion, Python is the best language to use for interviews if you have the time to learn it. It's such a high-level language that it feels like you're writing pseudocode.

By listening to a developer podcast, I learned about the Grokking the Coding Interview course. I paid for this course and used it to take my learning seriously. I finished the coding interview course and managed to complete the front-end developer course. I have now also come out with writing front-end apps using TypeScript and React/Redux.

Interesting stats in preparation

• Number of easy problems: 101 ~25h
• Number of medium problems: 172 ~86h
• Number of hard problems: 38 ~38h
• Grokking the Coding Interview ~70h
• System design prep ~15h
• Advent of code ~30h
• Creating resume/preparing for behaviorals ~ 30h

~300h

Interview results

• Strong efficacy
• Strong intuition
• Strong coding for production
• Strong leadership skills
• Strong Googlyness