Careeer Journal Responses Mod 3 Week 4

pd_responses_wk4.md

Journal Responses Mod 3 Week 4

1) Prepare for Job Shadow: AEIOU

• Activities: what questions do you have about the activities that a software developer does on a daily basis?

  • What's the ratio of paried programming to solo work?
    • It's more based on projects

• Environment: what questions do you have about the overall environment and culture of this workplace?

  • How is your company maintaining your culture in the remote world?
  • What is your company's plan as we move forward in this pandemic?
  • What kind of growth opportunities does the company offer for its employees?
    • Go to conferences, implement new tech all the time.

• Interactions: what questions do you have about the team at this company? What do you hope to see in your interactions during the shadow?

  • How close is the software engineering team? Would you consider your co-workers to be your friends?
  • I noticed there are a few gambee's listed on your website. Family business?
    • Did not talk about this, did not feel like it was an appropriate Q.

• Objects: what questions do you have about the code or the product?

  • What are lead capture systems ?
  • What is the tech stack that you use, and how prepared did you feel coming to this job from Turing?
  • What kind of version control do you use?

• Users: what questions do you have about how the company interacts with their users?

  • Do you as a developer have any direct contact with clients?

  • Does your team offer customer support for the products that you make?

2) After the Job Shadow, reflect on the same questions; what are your takeaways from the shadow?

• Activities: what was engaging to the person/people you shadowed?
  • I really appreciated my Shadow's willingness to stop and talk about any questions I had, and their calm and collected approach to working on software. That may seem a little silly, but often Turing can make things feel kinda frantic. It was really great to get a feel for the real-life pace of software development.
• Environment: what did you notice about how they talked about the culture and environment of this company?
  • The fact that it's a smaller team allows for a greater sense of individual respect, and autonomy within each person's work. I really appreciate that kind of vibe on a team, and it helped me calibrate my job search compass a little more.
  • It seemed like everybody was very supportive and open to helping eachother learn, which I appreciated so much.
• Interactions: what did you notice about your interactions with this person/people?
  • I noticed that this person was kind and patient, and really excited about the work that they are doing. My shadow was a turing alum, so I felt that there was a lot of understanding as to where I'm at now.
• Objects: what did you learn about their approach to code and/or product development?
  • I learned that when you are working at a "normal pace", as opposed to turing's breakneck turn our amps to 11 kind of speed and volume, that there is much more space to care about the little details as you go.
  • I appreciated the way that this person got really excited about the technologies that they are using, and it made it seem like their work is fun for them to do every day.
• Users: what did you learn about their approach to their users?
  • It seems like this company makes their users a higher priority, and as they are a multifaceted digital solutions company that the user is really the start and the end of a products development.
• What are your main takeaways from the shadow? How will you use this information to help you with your job search strategy?
  • I think that the biggest takeaway from this experience was really feeling affirmed in my progress as a fledgling developer. I was able to mostly keep up with and understand what my shadow was working on, and there were no points where I felt like something was completely over my head. It was a really nice moment to be able to look around and recognize how much I have learned during my time at Turing, and helped to extinquish some of the flames of imposter syndrome that I have been feeling recently.

3) Interview Prep:

• Pick a successful project and write about it with the STAR method (What was the situation/scenario of the project? What was the task/target of the project? What action steps did you take? What were the results?):

  • This current project that we are working on now has been a really big challenge: we were tasked with building a multi-page react application from scratch that incorporated a brand new technology and a new API in one week.

  • We opted to build our own back end and API for this application.

  • We had to come up with a concept for an application, learn how to build a server and database from scratch using only documentation and google searches to guide us, and build a front end react application in under a week.

  • Between the four of us, we studied the docs to help eachother learn these new technologies, and each honed in on an area of focus so that we could split up the work and delegate responsibilities.

  • We ended up turning in a very fun and innovative project, and among a sea of uncertainty we helped eachother learn how to accomplish this together.

• Write about a time you failed and what you learned from that experience:

  • When I was 26 I was engaged to a person that I believed to be my ideal partner, so much so that I asked her to marry me. Not long after becoming engaged, things took a durastic turn and the relationship became an incredibly unhealthy situation for me. Things escalated and came to a head, and I realized that I needed to call things off and leave the relationship in order to protect myself. It was one of the toughest things I have ever had to do, and is something that I've been working on unpacking and processing and healing from ever since. For a long time, it made me feel as though I had really really failed, and it really affected how I looked at myself and the amount of love I was able to recieve from others. Slowly, I've learned to recognize that as a moment where I really stood up for myself, recognized that I was in an unhealthy place, and made a change. I've come to learn that this was in fact a moment where I cared deeply for myself, and gave myself a ton of love by making the decision to end that relationship. From that incedent, I have come to learn more about myself and the ways that I interact with others than at any other point in my life, and I am grateful. I would never wish that kind of situation on anybody, but I wouldn't be who or where I am today without having gone through that.

• Write about how you've approached working with a team using a specific example:

  • I am the director of a performing arts company in Denver called Witches & Science. In may of last year, we had an idea for a show and wanted to challenge ourselves to bring it to life with a relatively short deadline. I booked a venue, and assembled a crew of dancers, musicans, audio and production technicians, and had under two months with a team of 15 people to compose a performance, rehearse it, figure out promotion and technical setup, and perform.

    It forced me to really lean into my organization skills: I had to be very efficient with using email and calendars to coordinate everyone's avalability, come up with a reahearsal schedule, correspond with the venue, and plan our marketing and promotion in addition to composing an hour long performance in a very short amount of time.

    Through delegation, perseverance, flexibility/adaptation and tremendous teamwork, we put on one of our most successful shows to date that ran over an hour long and was attended by almost 200 people.

• What other stories will you prepare to share?

  • This one is pretty hard to answer! I think I need to take some extra time exploring this question, I feel like my professional life up to this point has honestly not given me many good examples to pull from, but I think that maybe I need to give myself a little more credit and learn to reframe some of the things that I am currently writing off.

• Do some research into your top companies' tech stacks; what do you already know? What can you compare to your own learning? What do you need to learn more about?

  • The first thing that I need to know about here is: what are my top companies?. With falling behind in PD this inning, the industry research is one of the biggest things that is holding me back right now. My plan is to really dig into this research over the upcoming intermission.

• Using this interview prep resource doc, pick out at least 3 resources you will use to prepare for interviews as well as 3 behavioral questions you could practice:

  • I really like Ian's guide to technical interview prep, and I would like to spend more time with it.
  • Reading more about the interview process (Interview Process at over 500 Companies) seems like a great way to get a handle on what to prepare for.
  • Looking more into the Essential Javascript Questions seems like a good resource as well.

As far as behavioral Q's go:

• I need to practice talking about my transition to this line of work, and what strengths I bring from my ongoing career in music.
• I could use more practice thinking about/talking about how I've resolved conflicts in the past.
• I need to identify and practice talking about areas of growth. It's easy to say that you are not good at something, but it's sometimes very tough to figure out how to turn that into a positive.