|
|
|
|
|
|
by gls2ro
1436 days ago
|
|
|
It is hard to have a valuable answer for you without knowing more information like: What do you mean when you say “beat the tech interview”? to what jobs did you applied? What were they asking specifically? What kind of questions were you asked and how did you replied to them? |
|
|
On one of the older ones I stalled out on references. It was a fed gig and they wouldn't take freelance clients for references so I had to use managers from like a year or more ago and one of them just wouldn't respond to recruiter emails. They made me do a lot of tests though and they kept saying I was advancing because I beat the tests and got all the corner cases. I dropped some pastries at the old office (as much for my old colleagues as for my old manager) and emailed my old manager about the reference but she seems evasive about it. She's also extraordinarily busy and I don't really want to pressure her into giving a reference if she feels I was a bad employee (although she could say as much in the reference). She could come through in the end. I guess we'll see.
I'm in a few interviews right now. In the one I recently got spat out of, I had some leetcode problems which I think I got correct (I don't know if I got all the corner cases but I sure tested for everything I could think of). One of the recruiters said I fell down on the video interview. I'm sure their feedback will clear it up and I'll post it here to close the issue.
I don't think I'm that good at data structures and algorithms. I've definitely hit the limit of my natural talent. I'm bad at recursion (I almost always prefer while loops). I haven't been getting a lot of questions about binary trees and I think that's why I've been doing relatively well. Binary trees are okay too but I never see them in the wild and I can get confused about them. I need to grind a lot more leetcode but if I do that what I will have attained is not really a native excellence or deeper insight into the nature of data structures and algorithms but rather a kind of mental hashmap or muscle memory of approaches to mimic that I've seen in leetcode problems in the past (which is not unhelpful in and of itself).
Anyway the other day I did some landscaping around a transmission line tower for the power authority and wrote a little webscraper for an upwork client. The former paid me $2100 and the latter paid me $320 and the latter was a lot more work. Seems like there's easier ways to make a living than programming.