Prepare for Job Shadow: AEIOU Activities: what questions do you have about the activities that a software developer does on a daily basis?
How do you plan your day? How much time do you spend writing code vs interacting with others/discussing ideas/etc? What are some other things you typical day consists of, that we might not have thought about?
Environment: what questions do you have about the overall environment and culture of this workplace?
What are the things you enjoy most about your work enviroment? Are there any things you think could be better about your enviroment? How would you go about making those changes?
Interactions: what questions do you have about the team at this company? What do you hope to see in your interactions during the shadow?
Who are the people you comminucate with the most? Are there times where you feel you're having unconstructive communications? -i.e. meetings that has nothing to do with you/your work? Is you company fairly open to suggestions from your position/ positions lower/higher than yours?
Objects: what questions do you have about the code or the product?
What is the learning curve of the language you use? Are you currently using your favorite language? If not, what is your favorite language?
Users: what questions do you have about how the company interacts with their users?
When communicating with users, how much overlap is there in the understanding? I'm assuming they don't know how to write the programs (or they'd be doing it themselves), but do they understand the concepts? Or are they mainly telling you/your company "I want 'this'" and your company does "that"?
After the Job Shadow, reflect on the same questions; what are your takeaways from the shadow?
This is a little difficult. The prompts that we were given don't really match up the content we recieved from the job shadow. Not to say it was bad in any sense, but the direction we took was quite different that what we had in mind.
Activities: what was engaging to the person/people you shadowed?
The person we shadowed cared a lot about their work. They were very passionate about the technoligies they used, but also had mentioned not being able to use other "prefered" tech. This obviously wasn't a deal breaker to the person we job shadowed, but it did show that even 5 or 10 years down the line, we might not have every thing we want out of a job, and yet still can enjoy it.
Environment: what did you notice about how they talked about the culture and environment of this company?
We asked a little about the culture, however our point person worked solo and didn't have much to say on the topic.
Interactions: what did you notice about your interactions with this person/people?
We talked a little about work culture, but the person who we shadowed didn't seem to have a lot of interaction with very many people. One person who they did interact with was a UX/UI designer. This communication seemed generally straight forwards. They used a simple slack channel to send ideas.
Objects: what did you learn about their approach to code and/or product development?
They seemed very knowledgeable about the product they were supplying, and yet, it didn't seem like we, as students, are that far away from being able to do what they do. It was nice to be able to see code in a professional setting. It seems that as students, we (I, at least) spend so much time thinking about variable names, or what function to make this frunction run. What we got from our job shadow was that sometimes you just have to start typing and things will flow. Or they wont! And that's when you can change up your approach.
Users: what did you learn about their approach to their users?
When asked about users our point person had little to say. They mentioned that they don't interact with users, then we quickly moved passed the topic.
What are your main takeaways from the shadow? How will you use this information to help you with your job search strategy?
To be honest, I wasn't super impressed with the job shadow. It could have been that the person we shadowed seemed (to me) to have a sense of arrogance, or cockiness. This, for me, is usually a bit disengaging. Still, our questions were answered and we were able to see professional code in action. It really showed me that it's not some dream, or fantasy, but instead something very achievable.
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?):
My group project in mod 2 was designed to "teach" us multiple technologies at once. We had to learn what webpack was, how to implement testing spies, and how to make api calls, all while refactoring someone else's project. With as many moving pieces as we had, I would consider this project to be our "biggest" project yet. When my team got to the points of implementation, we split off to get more information, alone; then we came together to share what we learned. We ended up implementing said technologies with ease, all while understanding the concepts we were working with. It felt really good to be able to learn multiple things so fast, and I would say that we owe it to being a good team, one that could really communicate and get along well.
Write about a time you failed and what you learned from that experience:
We actually failed the previously mentioned project. Or, I should say, we didn't get enough "points" in each category to pass the project. Yet, I fondly look back on this project, what we learned, and the partners I had. The pieces that we failed in were small, mostly not being thorough enough, even thouhg we felt confident enough with our understandings. The feedback that we recieved really helped us understand the difference between doing work, and doing work well. Since then, we have been able to take what we learned and apply it to future projects, while making sure we produce a more professional product. What I learned on this project has really helped me since.
Write about how you’ve approached working with a team using a specific example:
Not code related When I was a firefighter, we often split into small groups or pairs to tackle individual pieces of line. The amount of work that two people can do together in synergy is exponential compared to alone. Every once in a while, we would gather the entire team (16) and move together to generate massive output. It was called "The Machine". It really shouwed me that when humans can cooperate and work together, greatness can be achieved.
What other stories will you prepare to share?
As a story writer, I have a few already up my sleeve. This includes tails of perseverance from commercial fishing, interpersonal skills from bartending, and learning to be adventurous outside my comfort zone while underwater gold dredging, among others.
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?
Looking at the job for microsoft, I already seem to know a decent amount about the technologies this job will use. Most of them are fairly obvious, as they were posted in the job application, however I am seeing "Salesforce" quite a bit more. This is a technology I am interested in looking into.
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 think all three resources I will chose to study are interview prep questions. Top 50 Programming Interview Questions, Essential JavaScript questions, and 10 Interview Questions Every JavaScript Developer Should Know.
I think I would like to practice some of the behavioral questions that I don't feel as comfortable with right off the bat. Those would include, "Describe your time at Turing. How did it prepare you for this career?", "Please describe to me the difference between waterfall and agile approaches to software.", and "Describe to me the steps you would take to build out a product."
We will do some behavioral prep in Mod 4! but look into those questions and start to pull examples. Let's get you thinking about these things early.