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**Autumn Nash:** Even for startups that I've applied to, they're like "Do this LeetCode." And I'm like... |
**Justin Garrison:** Well, and many of those startups are founded from big tech people. This is still like big tech spreading bad practices some places. |
**Autumn Nash:** Yeah. I feel like people are like "Now we have to use it, because they use it, so now we're all going to adopt it." |
**David Beale:** Yeah. I was interviewing for a job a couple of years ago, and they asked me to do Fizzbuzz, just like live, in a Zoom. Open up a terminal or whatever, and write Fizzbuzz. And so I wrote it as a Python one-liner, with a Lambda, and they got really angry... And so I posted that on Twitter. This was like ... |
**Autumn Nash:** I feel like it's almost like being the NeuroSpicy kid in math class, and everybody follows the teacher's way of getting the same equation and answer, and then you do it in this more efficient, better way, and it's still wrong... That's how I feel like interviewing for tech is now. It got to the point w... |
**Justin Garrison:** \[43:56\] And, at least in my experience - I've never got a job that I didn't have a network connection at a place. |
**Autumn Nash:** Did you have to LeetCode for all your engineer jobs? |
**Justin Garrison:** I've never got a job offer from somewhere I had to LeetCode. I've had a few, but I was always terrible at it. And most of the time -- and I made some interviewers mad at Google long time ago when I interviewed there, and I did it all in Bash. It was like "Sort this, pull out the uniques, do this ot... |
**Autumn Nash:** You try it and then you're like YOLO. |
**Justin Garrison:** Yeah. It works. This is an interview. And it wasn't even like -- yeah. So anyway. Every LeetCode position or interview I've had, I did poorly, and I never got a job offer from them. |
**Autumn Nash:** Same. |
**Justin Garrison:** And now, ever since -- I did, I think, I don't know, a handful of them in the 2010s... I just turn down people. I asked them up front, I'm like "Hey, are you going to have me LeetCode?" And they're like "Yes, it's part of our process." I'm like "Never mind." That's not the place for me. It's okay. ... |
**Autumn Nash:** You also have like a bigger -- |
**Justin Garrison:** That network is big, and the experience on my resume looks good, that people aren't asking me to prove myself. |
**Autumn Nash:** But you also build in public a lot, and you go to a lot of events, so I think that they probably just assume you know a lot. You know what I mean? Because you have like this body of work. |
**Justin Garrison:** Yeah. But everything that they looked at before, jobs I got, was not because I had that on my resume, of like "I can do this job." It was because I did the thing they were asking for outside of work. In my first sys admin job I had zero Linux experience on my resume, but I was building a blog, I ha... |
**Autumn Nash:** See, I love writing code, but I feel like I don't really do that at work as much as I'd like. I feel like I code more in my meantime, because I'm maintaining infrastructure. You know when you're diagnosing a problem in a big tech stack, it's like a line, or like fixing something in CI/CD... It's not so... |
**Justin Garrison:** I love debugging. Debugging is one of my favorite things. It's struggling, but I love diving deep into that stuff, and like "Well, let's pull out S-trace, and TCP dump, and see what we can find." |
**Autumn Nash:** Teach me how to love it. I love it in a certain way, but then I'm just very frustrated and have to go take a walk and come back. Like, I wanna go build cool things, but... |
**David Beale:** Yeah. I love writing code. So I actually pivoted into my career a couple of years ago, and I've been working as a sales engineer. But I'm only interviewing for SRE DevOps jobs now. I think I'm done with the sales for a while. |
**Justin Garrison:** But having SREs that know how sales function is so important, in my opinion. Being able to understand the uptime related to a customer call of like "Will you buy us?" is like super-critical to "Oh, that actually thing? We don't need an alert for that. No one cares." |
**David Beale:** Yeah. But it's interesting, for a while there in the 2010s in New York, job interviews were awesome. VCs were just throwing around money, so it was all these dudes my age - and I hate to say it, but it was all dudes, pretty much until I went to Glossier. And I'd show up at their WeWork or wherever thei... |
\[48:18\] But yeah, I don't know. It's weird. Interviewing now -- I think the thing that makes interviewing the worst these days is calendars. I feel like I'll get in a flow with a company, and have like a first interview, and then they'll be like "Alright, well, the hiring manager is on PTO until next month, and then ... |
**Justin Garrison:** "Do you remember who I am?" |
**David Beale:** Yeah, seriously. |
**Autumn Nash:** Do they still make you LeeetCode when you go for a job interview, or not really? |
**David Beale:** I've never LeetCoded. |
**Autumn Nash:** Really? Never? |
**David Beale:** I've had take-home assignments, I've done -- |
**Autumn Nash:** I love a take-home assignment. I would do that all day, because I can do it in the manner that I actually work. You know what I mean? |
**David Beale:** Yeah. I used to be a troll and I would write them in like Haskell or something like that, but I don't do that anymore. |
**Autumn Nash:** I love that you did it in Haskell, and Justin was like "I'm going to write this in Bash, just to be petty." I love it so much. Like, it does make me mad that I'm working for free, but at least I can show my skill in that way. I feel like it's an accurate show of how I work, so I feel like at least it's... |
**Justin Garrison:** Did I tell you about my take-home for Oculus before \[unintelligible 00:49:24.18\] |
**Autumn Nash:** No, but I'm scared. Look at his face. Y'all can't see his face, but he's making the Justin excited face, so it's going to be good. |
**Justin Garrison:** I remember, it was one of the worst things. They gave me a take-home. I passed the first couple of interviews, like "Here's a take-home. Set up a three-tier infrastructure. Here's your AWS credentials." I didn't get AWS console access, but they set up three VMs for me. Like "We want a database, a f... |
**David Beale:** Wow. |
**Justin Garrison:** And \[unintelligible 00:50:30.15\] |
**Autumn Nash:** Don't you love when you do a take-home assignment three interviews in and they don't even call you back, and you're just like... "Thanks..." |
**David Beale:** Yeah. |
**Justin Garrison:** The junior engineer's like "I have this ticket. Could you solve this for me? Thank you." |
**Autumn Nash:** Sometimes, I swear to God, they use your work to actually solve something. They'll be like "Can you make an architecture?" And I was just like "You're going to use this after, aren't you?" |
**Justin Garrison:** So David, you're interviewing right now. You're looking for SRE positions. What else -- you said you were building some stuff, kind of just in your free time, or learning to give back... What are you working on? |
**David Beale:** Yeah, so I'm working on a YouTube channel called The Uneducated Technologist. And I was inspired by this guy, The Uneducated Economist. And he's just this awesome dude that works at a lumber yard, and talks about really intense economic concepts, in like pretty relatable terms, just sitting this truck.... |
**Autumn Nash:** How do you navigate that when you're starting out though? Or like when you don't have 20 years of experience? |
**David Beale:** Well, I think you just have to think about what you like to do. Do you like talking to people? Are you extroverted? You're probably not a developer. Maybe, but like probably not. |
**Autumn Nash:** \[52:05\] I'm extroverted and a developer. |
**David Beale:** I am too, I am too. But we're on a podcast right now. Not -- |
**Autumn Nash:** You're not wrong. Which makes it really hard to find people to come on your podcast. |
**David Beale:** Yeah. We're the exception and not the rule. And a lot of times, if you're extroverted and a developer and you find out how much SEs make, you switch to go to market. That's what I did. But I think -- are you a creative type? Are you always doodling and drawing? You're a product designer. Are you really... |
And I think those are all three tracks, and it's pretty easy to get into, with a degree, without a degree... I've met product managers that were PhDs in philosophy. I've met incredible product designers that dropped out of high school. It doesn't matter where you come from. If you're doing what you like to do, you'll t... |
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