After doing quite a few interviews I can reflect on what I experienced with tech interviews. To see other devs take on this I have shared some videos below.
my roadmap for career pivoting
So when I set out on my journey to become a full stack engineer I created a road map. The roadmap included the MERN tech stack, AWS for deployment, and a sprinkle of mobile using flutter and XCode.
My objective was simple. I wanted to create compelling apps that did something useful. The ones I am most proud of are www.myagilestory.com and www.iwanttodine.com.
MyAgileStory has become my go to planning app for EmbroideryWare, education and other projects. It is an Agile planning app but it is also great for to do lists.
iWantToDine was a concept I thought of a year ago in cooperation with a restaurant owner I knew in Rehoboth beach. Then covid hit and the restaurants were just trying to stay afloat and had no time to collaborate with me on the product. The product is roughly finished and when things settle down it could become something great.
I think both of these products are a big part of why I got my full stack job.
my interview experience
Here are some stories of my interview experience. Generally I would have very encouraging conversations with devs and managers I met at social events like meetups, and code and coffees, which would led to equally great conversation with recruiters. However when my application went into the ether of the organization it just faltered. For some reason hiring managers who I never got a chance to chat with would not want to go forward.
During my search process one of my mentors suggested I to study algorithms, data structures and practice leet code and hacker rank problems every day. I did this for a two months and hated life. I just wanted to code my projects instead. There were some useful knowledge gains about Big 0 and why you would use one data structure over the next, but to write them from scratch seemed to be a total waste of time.
I had fang interview which asked me to do a simple problem and I failed. I choked. I totally blew it. I have a post on that experience here. This interview did not ask me about how I would approach a product design problem. I am pretty good a product design, after all I have my own software company that makes money but that didn’t matter. The Faag front end position just wasn’t the right fit. No ones fault but I still found the experience to be just awful.
I did have some really great code challenges though. In one challenge I had to create a unit conversion grading app in react. You can see it here https://www.mycodechallenge.com/. I really hit it out of the park with a well though out design and good code organization. They were really impressed. Unfortunately the job already got filled. That’s OK though I really had fun with it.
Watch these videos to get more opinions on this subject from some popular YouTubers.