10.3: Behavioral vs. Technical Interviews

Prior to Tech Elevator, I didn't know there were multiple types of interviews. Software developers typically have to deal with two: behavioral and technical.

The basic goal of a behavioral interview is to prove you are not a sociopath. This is what the average person usually thinks of when interviewing is mentioned. It goes kind of like this:

1.  You sit in a tiny room with unfamiliar people and they may offer you a beverage. If you are me, you always decline because you were taught from a young age to not accept food from strangers. 
   
   
2. They will then proceed to ask you a bunch of questions about your strengths and weaknesses. You must come up with a way to answer these without seeming like a narcissist or woefully incompetent. 
   
   
3. They will ask if you have any questions for them. The answer to this should always be yes. Come equipped with at least two, but no greater than four. For the love of all that is holy, do your research and ensure these are insightful and not salary related. 
   
   
4. You will leave and cry in your car, wondering if you bungled the opportunity of your dreams. 

All jokes aside, one of the most valuable things I've learned from Pathway is you are interviewing the company as much as they are interviewing you during the behavioral. I know a lot of us fresh out of cohort will be itching to accept any job and that may be okay considering COVID-19 and the fact most of us have quit our jobs to take on bootcamp, but in general, we shouldn't. 

Know what you want from a company in advance. Are benefits important to you? What about company culture or how they give back to the community? Do you want to work for a start up or a more established company? 

Personally, I am very concerned with company culture. I value a work environment in which people are respected and harassment/discrimination is not tolerated.  It should be inappropriate to comment on someone's body or start screaming at them for no reason. If there are rules, everyone should be held to them, no matter ranking or status. Failure to comply should be met with accountability. 

The above may sound like I'm being a overly sensitive, but I have stories that will make any person with an ounce of empathy cringe, including one in which, as a teenager, I managed to acquire a stalker and no one cared, but we can talk about those in another post. :)

I know I want a 401k or something similar because I have no retirement to speak of whatsoever. I'm worried that I will be 85, on my deathbed, and still reporting to management. 

So, what do you want? What do you care about? Keep those ideas in mind and decide which ones are dealbreakers and which you're willing to compromise on. 

Now that we've discussed behavioral interviews, it is time to talk about the unfamiliar beast that is the technical interview. Technical interviews are meant to ensure you are not a fraud. You will be expected to demonstrate your knowledge of coding and may even be given a kata to solve. There is absolutely no standard for these and you may even be given a technical by someone who knows nothing about coding. 

I will be honest with you: we had mock technicals a couple of weeks ago and several people cried. They can be overwhelming, but with a bit of practice, allegedly we will become comfortable with them...allegedly. 

Tips on acing a technical will go in my next post, as we've already covered quite a bit.  At this point, I've done both internal (to TE) and external mock interviews. I wasn't asked to code for either of them,  but here's one bit of advice I'll leave you with: Review your vocabulary. You may be the greatest developer in the world, but if you can't explain your code, people will fail to see how awesome you really are. 

Capstone 3: FATALITY!

Howdy, friends!

We have completed another capstone! This one focused on creating a RESTful API, SQL, and user authentication. It was an application similar to Venmo in which users can send, receive, and request money. 

After the capstone, we focused on HTML and CSS for week 9. This was nice because I have a lot of past experience with these and it was more like review. Capstones leave everyone exhausted and it can be hard to focus on new material when you've been coding for 12+ hours for several consecutive days. It felt like a refreshing break, but I still learned new things! I had never made a CSS grid before. I had also been self-taught, so I didn't realize you could use HTML for the structure of the page and do all of the styling with CSS. My previous pages looked nice, but they were inconsistent in how I styled them, which makes the code harder to read and can create problems later on. 

I've decided I definitely prefer front end development to back end. While both are enjoyable, I have a lot of fun designing sites and making them aesthetically pleasing, which I know is ironic because my blog is very plain. We used to have a saying when we were young and mean in college: "Ugly girl, heart of gold, bless her soul." That is my blog. Unattractive, but the content is quality (I hope!). 

If you're wondering about the "bless her soul" bit, it's because my friend group had noticed that some people tack that on to whatever horrible thing they said about someone else, as if that magically makes it okay. Also, the ugly girl could be anything: an unappealing, yet amicable dog or a particularly grotesque cucumber at the supermarket. It never failed, upon viewing such a spectacle, someone would mutter "Ugly girl, heart of gold, bless her soul" and we'd all bust out laughing. 

We came up with that phrase one night at Tee Jaye's. Sometimes, I miss those late nights laughing around a table and filling up on gray food. I was especially fond of the Barnyard Buster, two eggs over-easy on a pile of home fries and split biscuits. The whole mass was then smothered in "sausage" gravy, which often tasted only of flour. It was basically Heaven. 

Perhaps I am feeling nostalgic because in the wake of COVID-19, the idea of sitting in a restaurant with friends seems unlikely to occur any time soon. On the bright side, I do feel grateful for technology like Zoom, which enables us to see and hear our loved ones in real time. That's part of why software development is so exciting to me; I like the idea of making things that enhance people's every day lives. If a program can take a bit of the burden off of an individual, that's a beautiful thing. 

8.2: Coding Bootcamp: Casual Suffering Playlist Now Live!

Struggling with imposter syndrome? Been looking at code for so long that your brain has melted like the crayons your kid left in the backseat of the car? 

Settle down, my friend. Let me tell you a story. 

My parents have lived in the same home for over a decade. In fact, I, too, used to live in that home for several years. It is conveniently located about ten minutes away from me and is nearly a straight shot down Cleveland Avenue. 

My parents and I are not estranged, we see each other frequently, however, two weeks into Tech Elevator, I got lost on the way to their house. 

I just kept driving down Cleveland, wondering where I should turn. I was exhausted and only realized something was wrong when I noticed twenty minutes had passed instead of the usual ten. 

Point of the story? Coding brain is very real. Take a break and get pumped with some dancy tunes, provided by yours truly. ;)

P.S.A. This playlist is great for adults, but not necessarily for children. I wouldn't blast it for family fun time.  If you're looking for something that would be appropriate for kids, try listening to The Aquabats. They also have a fun tv show that is available on YouTube. 

Capstone 2: Dead and Done!

 Hello, all! 

I haven't posted much because I was busy working on my second capstone for module 2. It was incredibly stressful, but my partner and I created something we are very proud of. 

Module 2 was fairly short and deceptively easy at first, but the last few concepts came in like a roaring lion and knocked me back a few pegs. Here is what we covered:

• Introduction to databases
• Aggregate functions and group by
• Joins
• Insert, update, and delete
• Database design
• Database connectivity
• Integration testing
• Database security

For our capstones, we had to create a command line venue reservation program. It was intense! My partner, Olivia, and I had both received similar feedback on our previous capstones. We both had put too much in our CLI in the past as opposed to breaking it up into smaller methods called from a different class. We caught ourselves making the same mistake this time, so we spent most of Saturday refactoring things! It was frustrating, but worth it. Our code was clean and easy to read. 

One lesson I learned during this capstone is to be proud of the work completed, even if the whole project isn't finished. We didn't have tests, but were able to recognize our product was the best we could do in the time we were given. 

Capstone reviews this round were done with another team in addition to Brian. This was helpful because we could see the different ways each team chose to approach the challenge. The other team had amazing formatting using printf, which I took notes on and hope to use in the future. 

In addition to the capstone, I had to prepare for my Lightning Talk. Lighting Talks are short presentations that can be about absolutely anything. Mine was about crafting prop weapons from EVA foam. 

P.S. If you're wondering about the aftermath of my last post, everything is okay. Brian scheduled an extra session with me to go over the part I didn't understand. It turns out I don't trust myself enough. If something doesn't work, I assume I took a completely wrong approach when in reality, a small adjustment needed to be made. This causes me to write a lot of code over again when I don't need to. In the future, I will focus on refactoring what I have before I try different methods. I will also try to reach out sooner when I'm stuck as opposed to struggling to the point of despair, haha. 

5.4: Why Can't I Git It?

I feel like a girl who dies in a horror movie. Not the first one --the one that is typically offed because...well, slut-shaming, but the second. 

The Second Girl is blissfully unaware of the imminent trauma. She is busy working at a hip coffee shop alone at night, hiking, or being a good friend to The Final Girl. Basically, the kind of stuff that would make a great medication commercial if played in a series of short clips with an uncomfortable smile. 

Second Girl is just trying to live her life and then she gets knifed or eaten. She takes out the trash and ignores the faint scuttling from behind the dumpster. Then poof. Gone. 

That's how I feel. 

I'm overwhelmed and second-guessing myself. There's a voice in my head that tells me I'm too stupid and might as well quit. Java is the monster and the program being executed is me...sorry, that's a bad joke and the analogy breaks down there.

I'm telling you this because I want to represent an honest look at what coding boot camp is like. It's not always easy;  there's a reason why Redrum is one of my most popular posts to date. 

So, what set this off today? I had an issue with an optional exercise and went to my instructor for help. He explained some things but when I went to implement his instructions, my code still didn't run and so naturally I assume I am dumber than the troll in the girls' first-floor bathroom. It is late and I am too ashamed to admit to him I didn't understand his instructions, thus the natural decision was to admit it publicly to a bunch of strangers. :)

I will play around with it more tomorrow after some rest. I didn't really get to stop coding today, so I'm feeling fried. If I don't figure it out, I'll swallow my pride and ask again because I really care about learning this stuff.

Just an FYI: I know that this shroud of despair and self-doubt will pass. I will be able to look back on this post with a feeling of accomplishment, just like I do with Redrum. Eventually, I understood how to use loops and arrays. The same will happen for this concept, too. 

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TL;DR: Coding boot camp is hard. You will have bad days. It gets better.