So like I mentioned in my previous blog post, I have been interviewing for a while. My last interview was a few weeks ago at Facebook's Menlo Park office. I was just informed recently that: "Unfortunately, we won't be going forward at this point." So with that I can now add Facebook to the list of companies that have rejected me in the last few months, a list which includes Google, Microsoft, Bloomberg, Dropbox, and a number of smaller startups and lesser known companies. Needless to say, I am feeling humbled. Demoralized, even.
I used to believe I would be a great interviewee. After all, I'm friendly, and I make friends easily. I've gotten pretty good at talking to strangers. A friend of mine told me she likes inviting me to her parties because I sort of walk around and make an effort to talk to every single one of her guests. It's something I genuinely enjoy doing. Needless to say, all of the recent rejections I've received have convinced that I was very wrong. At this point, I have to assume that I'm pretty bad at interviewing.
I think -- though I'm not certain -- that it's the technical portion where I'm falling short. Some people say that the technical portion of a software interview isn't necessarily a test to see how quickly you can write the solution but a test to see "how you think and how you approach a problem". Well, after these last few months, I've come to the conclusion that those people are full of junk. It is absolutely a test to see how fast you come up with the optimal solution. It's even better if you knew the optimal solution to begin with. In all of the interviews I've done recently, I always got a rejection after an interview if I took a little too long to think of the solution or if I took too long to code that solution. My "thought process" didn't matter. The only times where the interview process progressed to the next stage were when I quickly thought of the solution or knew the solution beforehand because I had seen a similar problem before. Speed is the only thing that seems to matter. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying.
Unfortunately for me, speed was never my strength. I am a slow guy. When I record my own voice, I'm always amazed at how slow my speech sounds. I swear, it sounds much faster when I'm hearing it in my head. Many years ago, someone asked me if I was from Texas. Bewildered, I asked him why he would ask me that and he said: "Oh, I thought you talked with a Southern drawl." I informed him that I grew up in California. I was once pulled over by a cop who thought I was heavily intoxicated despite the fact that I only had one beer 2 hours ago. He made me do the field sobriety test (which I easily passed). I'm convinced that he thought I was drunk because I talk kind of slow.
I think my brain just has a lower clock rate or something. I do everything in a kind of slow and deliberate manner. But my strength was never in my speed. My strength was always in my ability to concentrate, and in my stick-to-it-ness. Whereas many people these days claim to suffer from attention deficit disorder, I have the opposite condition. I can easily sit still and pay attention for a 3 hour lecture but find it difficult to multi-task. I suppose, if my brain were a computer, it would be one that wasn't very responsive but was good at performing large batch jobs. During my flight to and from Menlo Park, I noticed that everyone else at the airport was perpetually tapping and clicking away on their phones and laptops. I was content to just read my library book. All of this has generally worked in my favor for both my academic and professional career, except when it comes to the typical 45 minute technical interview, especially at a place like Facebook, where the coding interviews involve solving two programming problems in under 40 minutes -- that's no more than 20 minutes for each one. And if it takes you a little too long to solve one of them you're toast.
I'm not really complaining about Facebook's interview process. Theirs is honestly better than most, including Qualcomm's. Maybe I'm just trying to make myself feel better... I don't know. But I do wish there weren't this "One-Size-Fits-All" attitude when it comes to tech interviews. For example, a good friend of mine is an excellent data scientist and machine learning researcher, but he has limited experience as a programmer. Yet, the Googles and Facebooks of the world force him to go through the same sorts of problems (e.g. find the kth largest integer in this array in linear time) that they would ask a computer science undegrad looking for an internship. I think there's got to be a better way than that. It's just.... stupid.
After the Facebook interview, I told myself that if I don't get an offer, I will stop interviewing and just focus on becoming a better engineer one way or another. I may revisit the job search again in a few years time, but in the meantime I'm just going to focus on learning as much as possible and try to work on some interesting projects. I've been meaning to do some stuff with a BeagleBone Black I bought a while back. And maybe I'll take some interesting courses online. And I'm going to stick around at Qualcomm for the time being. Fortunately, I did get one job offer -- an internal team within Qualcomm that I interviewed with a few weeks ago. Admittedly, it's not the most glamorous work; I won't be working on deep learning research or self-driving cars or whatever else is hot right now (I tried to get a role doing that sort of thing in Qualcomm's Corporate R&D division but those hiring managers wouldn't give me the time of day) but it's a team that designs telematics modules for cars. So far, I've been really impressed by the all-encompassing knowledge these guys have of virtually every hardware and software component on the modules. They really know their Stuff. Again, it's not the sexiest kind of work -- Ethernet switches, USB drivers, RF front ends, Linux kernel stuff, etc. -- but it's important work, and hopefully the knowledge I gain there will be useful for me in my career.
It'll take me some time, but I'll get over the rejections. I once consoled a friend who had just interviewed and failed at Google for the third time. I told him: "Who cares? You can work on whatever you want on your own!" Now I have to take my own advice. I'm humbled and dejected, but I'm more motivated than ever!