The Applications

I haven’t been looking actively looking for a switch from my current organization. But often, while working it keeps hitting me how I can contribute more, how I could be engaged to well… more engaging work. No offense to my current work, I enjoy it alot, I really like to be able to work and learn new paradigms and methods to implement to in my work and do work with some very talented and kind engineers, however what I miss about my startup work experience is that how I could one day interact with the data fetching service on one day, learn something from it or even contribute to it, and on the next day, work on a different issue altogether. It kept me on alert, it kept me learning and it kept me moving. I miss that stimuli. And hence, comes the urge to try and explore, and therefore I ended up applying to a few roles that engaged me.

The Roles

The roles i’ve been applying to range from fullstack roles, to AI Engineer roles to Backend or Frontend only roles. I’ve also applied to a couple data roles and have rightfully not received a call back, which makes me want to make a clean data engineering project (that day shall come soon).

The Interviews.

I have received a few call backs, not many but I’d say like 25% of the applications have gone to the next stage.

However I will only be talking about my most significant experiences here.

One of the experience I would love to talk about, and probably the best one I’ve had in my young professional journey is when I had to trial for the work I was interested for. It was unique to me, I had a conversation with the owner and I was amused by the product he was working on, I could see the ambition in his eyes and that alone made me want to work with him. I worked with him for a week, where I got access to amazing set of people working on different tools, it was a work environment like no other I had seen. I loved every bit of it, and despite having a full time job was eager to visit the place everyday and work there. In my view, I successfully implemented the requirements, got the full understanding of the codebase rather quickly, unfortunately I believe I didn’t tick all the boxes required to move to the next stage. Valuable feedback I got was about how I need to think of requirements in a Systems Context, and rightfully so I have learned to approach it in my subsequent interviews.

Another callback I’d like to talk about is is from a fully remote company. I had forgot about my application for it, and 4 months later I recieved a mail stating I had an interview with them the day after. I read up about their interview system and realized it was something I could perform quite well. One learning I’d like to take away from my interview here was confidence, I knew the answers to most of the questions, but I was simply doubting myself too much before answering them. The interviews (2 rounds back to back) lasted for 2.5 hours, they were draining to some extent and were pretty indepth, I believed I answered most of the questions very well but in the end couldn’t justify some answers as I should have and could have. I was disappointed to be rejected.

Just a few days after this, I came across a hiring post by one of India’s biggest unicorn. I applied and to my surprise I was shortlisted, the HR was prompt and clear. I read up about the interview and realized that it will be a purely 60 minute technical round where I’ll be asked to code up the problem they’d throw at me. I was nervous since the opportunity was amazing in my eyes, I’d get to work with some of the best engineers of the country. Moreover despite it being a huge company, it still was famous to retain it’s startup culture, something which I was craving. The interview happened, I was asked a medium to tough leetcode question. I had practiced basics of Binary Search, Hashmaps and Trees before the interview. The question was related to disjoint set. I was able to come up with an approach for it, I coded it up successfully (even to my surprise lol). However, I didn’t answer a follow up question to it to the utmost proficiency. I asked the interviewer for some feedback and he was happy with my approach and my interview. I was expecting a call for the next interview and waited a day for the same until my patience ran out and I ended up calling the HR. She notified me she will shortly let me know. A couple hours later, I got a mail regarding my rejection. Again, I was pretty disappointed.

The Takeaways

I have realized the need to be structured, and disciplined. I realize I do have a journey to cover, I don’t want to label my failures as bad luck. I have internally been saying that but now that I write about it I realize, I can be better. I can be more confident, I can study more. I can be more disciplined and above all I can be more consistent. I believe I have it in me to find the job or environment that fits my will, and I believe the day is not that far away.

I am humbled by my failures, but I also am, grateful to them.