Activities: what questions do you have about the activities that a software developer does on a daily basis?
- What does your week look like as far as meeting with your teams or having one-on-one meetings?
Environment: what questions do you have about the overall environment and culture of this workplace?
- Do you do anything outside the office to enhance work culture? Do you like your work culture? Why?
Interactions: what questions do you have about the team at this company? What do you hope to see in your interactions during the shadow?
- Ask about how often they meet or if they have stand ups each morning. Also how much freedom as an engineer do you have? When are you able to make your own decisions on the tech vs being told what to do?
Objects: what questions do you have about the code or the product?
- Why did you choose to work with advertising?
Users: what questions do you have about how the company interacts with their users?
- Do you experience any push back from your users? How would you test a new product?
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 actually knew my point person through my cousin who studied at galvanize with him. I really liked that he had also attended a bootcamp and could talk me through his experience with it.
Environment: what did you notice about how they talked about the culture and environment of this company?
- They all seemed very happy with their office space and were eager to get back into the office, which was a good sign I thought.
Interactions: what did you notice about your interactions with this person/people?
- He was very casual, which put me and ease and we were able to have really good communication because we both felt comfortable.
Objects: what did you learn about their approach to code and/or product development?
- I learned that I actually know a good amount and that Turing has seriously prepared me beautifully. I did however come to understand that the bigger learning curve is their work culuture and how they as a business go about things vs just my technical skills.
Users: what did you learn about their approach to their users?
- It was really cool because they were actually working to get away from their legacy and working on a beta. I asked how they tested this as far as with their customers and some customers actually test it out for them and give them feedback. I thought that was really cool to show their trust between the two.
What are your main takeaways from the shadow? How will you use this information to help you with your job search strategy?
- It was essentially what I had expected. It overall just made me that much more exciting to get to start working as a software dev.
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?):
- The situation I found myself in at Turing was working on an already built app that under the hood was a complete mess. I was paired up with two classmates and tasked with refactoring the code. Really this was the first time I had not built an app from the ground up but instead tried to understand what was happening and how better to go about it. First step I knew was to understand the project, what was the goal? How should it be working? What is the user trying to do with this app? Then I came up with a project board to hit all the major bases. First lets understand, then lets go through the code and refactor what we can and follow SRP. That probably took the longest amount of time, but was well worth it in the end. The result was my team finished with time to spare, so by following our project board and keeping each other accountable we were very successful with the project.
Write about a time you failed and what you learned from that experience:
- A time I failed was...
Write about how you've approached working with a team using a specific example:
- I really love working on teams and seeing how others approach problems. Normally I do like to take point but really I just like having a plan to keep each other accountable and make sure we will meet our deadline.
What other stories will you prepare to share?
- Unsure yet. Probably some times at college, working as a research assistant, working at Bell Helicopter, and my time at Turing and the successes I've had.
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?
- I need to learn more about cryptocurrency if I want to be taken seriously in an interview with some place like Gemini ro Coinbase.
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:
- Need to work on a story of when I failed. I need to also work on the 'whats your weakness' question. Also need to do more code challenges that I could potentially see in an interview.