So, You Failed Your Interview... - Principal Software Engineering Manager AMA

just getting the stream kicked off here I need one moment for good old Instagram to be the last one as per usual so wait one more second on that come on Instagram you can do it kind of annoying it's like hey you gotta wait if it doesn't connect in like two seconds I'm sorry Instagram you're not getting it today oh I think that's my fault actually okay I need one more second look I'm unprepared I apologize I didn't turn it on that's my fault this time just this one time Instagram cool so today I'm going to be talking about my previous newsletter issue which is uh failing interviews and I thought this would be a super interesting topic to go over um because I think when we're talking about advice for like anything right if it's um you know programming advice if it's career advice and stuff like that I think a lot of the time and probably rightfully so there's a lot of like follow this guidance like here's the happy path here's what you should focus on but I feel like we don't often talk about um like when things don't go right and I think that's important because those are real experiences that people have and I think that if we start talking about them a little bit more it almost like normalizes I'm hoping that it helps normalize it right so um I think like I'm a big fan I know it's not the same topic but impostor syndrome is one of these things where I feel like when people talk about it more we start to realize yes it is a real thing yes everyone goes through it yes it's okay um and the more that you talk about it and you're hearing about it from other people the more that you start to go you know what like yeah it sucks to go through but other people do this as well and like it it almost just feels like you can relate to people and then not that it fixes it but like there's a bit less of a burden on you as you're going through this so I wanted to talk about that from the perspective of interviewing um I think that you know given especially like the job market and stuff there's a lot of people especially like I see on social media a lot of people worrying about you know if they're trying to get into the industry whether they're career switchers or uh boot camp grad if you're a college or university grad you're self-taught whatever it happens to be I know that there's a lot of people that are concerned and and trying to figure out how to navigate all this so um while there's tons of advice out there and and I recommend that you're finding resources and stuff that work for you I think the reality is and what I want to focus on is that even if the the stars align and you have the most amazing interview and you've impressed your your interviewers things can still be outside of your control and like there might be someone else that just so happens to do better that day so like at the end of the day there are going to be situations where things don't go as planned for you and I want to make sure that you're okay with that right like I don't want you to feel defeated when it happens so that's what we're going to be talking about today U Elemental Magic's card game it's a good username um hello it goes well good to see you on Twitch which reminds me folks um please feel free to use the chat I always like let letting people know where um the most people are coming from and right now it's it is uh it is Twitter or X um but YouTube is surprisingly close in second place that's usually not the case um I actually don't know if LinkedIn if you're watching this on LinkedIn if you want to go ahead and send a message in the chat that would be super helpful so I know it's coming through I would hate to go through all of this and then miss the YouTube or the the LinkedIn folks um so cool I I'm seeing Instagrams working so I'm in the yeah yeah and this is so Vall thanks for your comments so sorry folks the the Instagram comments don't come in on the feed so I apologize for that I try to read them out though when I can so uh users saying I'm in the top 3% Elite code contest and still not able to land internships at Big Tech and two years of experience as well so there are there going to be situations like this um Elemental Magic card game says I didn't fail any interviews I crushed my interview now there are no more interviews um I think I hunted them to Extinction so that's objectively false but I'm glad that your interviews went well for you that's good news um Elaine I not sure if I'm pronouncing your name correctly so I apologize but uh you're close Awesome Justin on LinkedIn is working hi Justin good to see you um so yeah folks as I'm going through this please feel free to ask questions and stuff in the chat I am happy to kind of derail what I'm talking about to answer your questions as soon as I have a moment to breathe uh and I I always say this on my live streams but I would much rather be spending time answering the things that you're asking and wanting to talk about in the chat because otherwise I would just record a YouTube video so this is time that I want to be for you um so I'm I'm hoping that we can use it for that Hamza good to see you uh Elemental Magic's best result is around 99.99% contest still can't get interviews for junior positions yeah it's challenging right now so I want to be able to talk through this and the I have other advice and other resources and stuff like that about how to do in my opinion how to help succeed in interviews and my perspective on that this talk today is going to be sort of the opposite it's going to be like you're going to you're going to fail an interview and that's it's okay and I want to talk through that so I just want to give you some some different perspective as we go through this because I don't want people to go through their interviews and and feel like beat up from it and then they're down on themselves and then they're like well I never want to interview again like it was a terrible experience like we got to get back to it okay so that's going to be the goal in today's conversation um if you want and I'm not you know saying you have to or anything uh the live streams that I do at this time I just put a link into the chat to weekly. deev leer.com depending on when you're watching it it might already be out but I will be going into more detail in a like an edited YouTube video on my uh my Google interview failure and what else do I want to say before I get into it um that might be all um but yeah definitely you know try them in in the chat infected FPS good to see you um I remember one more thing I want to say just want to read infected FPS as comment here feel my experience has been wildly different than most only ever interviewed three times only failed out of one which ended up being uh bullet dodged awesome that's great to hear um you know I think I think statistically that's probably very different than what a lot of people are going through I'm not sure when this happened if this was more recent that's I mean great for you honestly um but I think uh I think I'm hearing a lot more that people are even struggling to to even land the interviews which is why I wanted to talk about if you happen to finally Land one and you and you fail it like it's okay there will be more even though it doesn't feel like it the other thing that I forgot that I wanted to mention uh is that I will be live streaming tomorrow morning so right now for me it's 900 p.m. uh PST so at hopefully at 7: a.m. PST tomorrow morning I'll be live streaming that will be uh coding I'm going to be going through Azure blob storage and uh just kind of walking through some Basics with that it's not going to be super in-depth it's not going to be um you know extreme detail in best practices it's just going to be leveraging Azure blob storage to work through some uh we'll probably do like a console application just to play with the API and stuff so we'll try that out um I imagine the standards of passing interviews are much higher now as well yeah this is probably true um given the volume of applicants I would wager that's probably the case overall not only just passing interviews um but even just and I should talk about this as well but like even getting your resume scene so I'll try to touch on this a little bit um yeah and I would you know infected FPS yeah like going back maybe about 10 years ago the 2021 um I mean great that you had that experience but yeah I I think like even in my own experience like I'm trying to think even when I had internships like oh man I'm I'm getting older now uh like over 12 years ago I guess like internships for me those inter like didn't seem like I was totally uh you know bombing them or anything so yeah I think maybe you know things are changing in that regard but one of the takeaways like spoiler alert one of the takeaways from this entire conversation is going to be the fact that there's so many things that are outside of your control that you might you might even just have if you have a panel of interviewers you might have a couple people that maybe they suck at interviewing maybe they're focused on things that I I personally wouldn't agree with that you might not like and the decision doesn't work out in your favor and it sucks but like these types of things happen and there isn't like I don't know like a perfectly uniform way that everyone interviews across the board so the best we can do is talk about the general approach and like I said there's plenty of resources on that so uh okay cool okay so let's let's drive into the conversation here so um I just wanted to pull up my newsletter so I have a frame of reference here so okay so I wanted to start kind of by talking about the fact that like when you're going through interviews um let me back up one more second on on the resume front Okay so you're applying to jobs um I was talking I actually had a call with someone yesterday a student from the University of waterl I don't know if he'll watch these or not um but I was having a conversation with him about internships and resumés and things like that and the and I actually I should plug my own um I have a vlog Channel called code commute and I talked about this in the episode that'll I'm currently uploading it while I live stream probably shouldn't do that but um one of the topics that I was going over was the same conversation I had with this student which was around the idea of like volume for your resumés so the thing that I always like to say to people is um yes I think networking is super important I think networking and having genuine interactions with people building that up it's a long-term play it's not just while you're job searching um it's not something where you just reach out to someone randomly and you're like hey give me a referral and whatever like hope for it it's a long-term play it's an investment into sort of um you know building your network work and people that you can regularly interact with like you don't want to just try to like use it as a shortcut but when you're applying to jobs and using like you're you're applying and sending your resume in like you can do this more in volume yes you can and you could and possibly should be tailoring your resume to jobs that you really want but you have the like call it luxury of more easily sending out applications in bulk right so the example that I was giving this student and that I talked about on my Vlog was that if you take two individuals that are identical hypothetically okay and individual a applies to 10 jobs and let's say they're going to be the same jobs individual B applies for same resume individual b instead though applies instead to 10 jobs they apply to 100 jobs statistically individual B will have a 10 times greater chance of Landing a job or at least Landing an interview in this in this example so the point here being like whatever likelihood whatever percentage chance you have of Landing an interview is going to be like multiplied by the volume of applications you're doing now if you have a terrible resume or something and you have a 0% chance like zero times anything is going to be zero but my point in general is going to be volume can work in your favor in this case so uh I do encourage you to apply to more jobs but I also encourage you to be spending the time building up your network because that's going to be incredibly valuable not only during your job search but beyond that it could be later in your career it could be your next job search but that kind of thing takes time so don't rush that part the job applications more in volume that could be a little bit more rushed because it's just easier to do and I think you'll have better success with building up relationships when you genuinely try to do that versus just you know dming a 100 people and saying review my resume like doesn't fly so well so that's what I wanted to preface here um focusing on the interview portion itself though okay so one thing that I want to call out in the beginning of this talk is that going through the interview um there are going to be situations like it's not just you okay so it's easy that we can get down on ourselves and like blame ourselves for certain things it's also very easy to do the opposite and just blame the interviewer but there are literally some situations that are just not in your control and I think that it's important to acknowledge what these things are so um in general I would say from the perspective of like coding questions and maybe I'll back up one second here not all but many interviews follow a format that's kind of like what a explain here especially big Tech interviews are kind of like this pattern where um you will have a combination of say like a coding question uh a system design question and then like behavioral interview questions and this it will depend where you are which company and what level you're at but usually you have these three things mixed in and you kind of layer on the fact that you'll have different interviewers the more Junior you are it's like that you'll not be asked U any or many system design questions and it's just because the likelihood of the expectation that you have that knowledge is lower you might get one might be more simple but generally that's kind of a rarer thing you might get more like uh coding questions like lead code style and some behavioral ones I would say the more senior you become the more emphasis there is on like a system design type of thing because those are the scales of problems that you'll be looking at more still get coding questions you'll still get behavioral questions and then for me like when I was interviewing to be a manager uh at at Google at Facebook at Amazon and Microsoft the I had all of those types of questions and for me it was usually like one coding question and in in one instance there were none so one coding question or none some system design questions almost in every single case I believe and then a lot more like behavioral interview questions Okay so so those are the types of things that you'll see across the board depending on your level and where you're applying to they might shift on the on the perspective of like coding questions though oh um what's uh behavioral questions sure so uh examples of Behavioral questions are like can you tell me about a time where you were working with a a team member that was challenging to work with or could you tell me about a time that you um you were leading a project or tell me about a time where you partnered with another team to deliver a project successfully or um a lot of these types of questions will focus on like a call it like a key competency that the company is interested in so like Amazon for example has leadership principles that they publish and these types of questions um there's a goal when they're asking you that so sometimes people hear these questions and they'll you'll they'll hear tell me about a project where some situation and what the interviewee is hearing is like okay what is a project that I can just talk about and then they talk about the project and they kind of Miss like why the interviewer was asking the question okay so behavioral questions are about scenarios and it's going to be more about the things that are outside of writing code and technology so it's not going to be like hey optimize this it's going to be more like here's a scenario walk me through what your experience has been like in that situation hopefully that helps let me know if you want more clarification on that though so for coding questions I would say like I feel like a lot of the time especially in big Tech coding questions are like a gamble um uh there is a lot of focus on like these lead code style questions um there's nothing wrong with lead code I just personally feel like it does not represent real software engineering like I don't want to say at all but like it's a pretty unique skill set I've already seen people in the chat I think it was Elemental Magic card game was saying you know they're and even sorry from uh from Instagram as well the message isn't showing up in the chat but um they're saying like you know like top percentage of like lead code um questions and and not Landing interviews and stuff and it's like that's kind of separate from even getting the interview in the first place but being good at leite code questions means that you have a leg up in the interview and I don't I don't want to say like that's all but like when it comes to like building software in teams I don't think lead code questions from my experience they don't go as far as people like to think so I don't really know why there's such like a such a focus in big Tech and other companies needs to focus on like on leite code style questions I just don't think that they're representative of what we're doing on the job but these things come up a lot um I don't like that people try to set up the questions to have like a trick to them like there's a trick optimization it just like the whole thing feels kind of gross to me but some people love practicing leite code questions like they enjoy the problem solving and stuff so I'm not trying to say don't go do that don't learn them if you enjoy it especially by all means but it is good for interviewing I I always say it's good for interviewing unfortunately but so um the the point here is that the questions that you might get that are lead code style it is a bit of a Gamble and depending on the interviewer you have because I've seen this kind of thing being on the panel of interviewers where you'll have someone say like oh they they answered it like the the basic way but they couldn't get the little optimization like they couldn't find the trick to optimizing it so like they didn't do well and in my head I'm thinking like why are you scoring on scoring them whether or not they found the trick like what's the goal of this question how good they are at finding tricks or how good they are at coding so it just feels really bizarre um but you can always end up with questions like this when I go through my example um for for Google I had something kind of like this where it was like kind of just I stumbled on it so um seeing some messages in the chat here okay so um so Elemental Magic card game so I I think I always knew it wasn't purely technical but I still have no idea how they're evaluating my answer so um I'll take a I don't like uh I'm really bad at like sales pitches but I'm going to instead of waiting to the end I'm going to advertise this now just so that you know what's available and I always like mentioning like I put out tons of free content so um any time I have something that's like for sale it's because it's more guided and structured but like you could probably go through all of the content I have across everywhere and try to piece it together and come up with things like this but if I jump over um to the full screen mode here so I did just launch a course with Ryan Murphy it's on dome train I will also put this in the chat if you're interested but uh I'm going to scroll down just so you can see the curriculum here okay so the curriculum at 6 hours long but we do talk about things like uh common questions right so these are all about behavioral interviews and styles of questions you can get um we talk about what it's like to look through the manager's lens when we're going through interviews we talk about what it's like when you're in the interview what to focus on how to prepare for it and there's even a section where uh so I did this with Ryan Murphy um and Ryan Murphy and I interview each other um I think Ryan used his real career examples I uh I did not but we also didn't know how we were going to answer for each other by the way people on Instagram I'm really sorry that this doesn't like um display properly if I can move it over a little bit it might Center I'm so sorry about that it looks terrible but um we do have uh these courses sorry this course available and we'll have more courses coming out that aren't just programming because Dome training has historically been like net and C kind of stuff so we've signed up for more courses but anyway this is uh Master the behavioral uh sorry nailing the behavioral interview up here and if you check out the top there is a sale right now for 30% off so it's like not so bad but that is my plug I'm going to switch back to the full camera mode here that's my face there you go cool so going back to the chat um so yeah uh Elemental Magic's card game the it's important just to understand that the interviewer is is asking you a behavioral question not because the goal is to hear all the technical details about the project the goal is because they're trying to get you to to explain some type of behavior that they're they're interested in so I think a good example of this is if you're interviewing um sorry if you take Amazon for example they're published leadership uh traits that they're looking for those principles there's a big list of like 20 or something they're going to be asking you questions that relate to those things so you want to find ways to when you're hearing the question like which one of these are they interested in hearing about like why are they asking me this question and don't just blab at them about the technical details of a project so that's my advice on that um hearing someone go on about how they designed and implemented something always going further uh than LC in my book you get a better idea of their thought process and their main competencies yeah I think um the lead code stuff I just don't think does a lot um I like I was also talking to this student yesterday and I said personally I like more conversational interviews because I like people being natural talking about things and I think that's important um oops back in the days I prefer finding interview questions from GitHub about specific Tech stack yep so uh ban from from Facebook thanks for for joining man it's good to see you on here I appreciate it um but yeah like especially for um I mean you can find resources for this kind of stuff everywhere so that's why when I said like we have a course on this stuff it's just that it's curated some people find that like um you know paying for a course and being like I have accountability now because I paid for this thing and they like it being organized that works well for some people but literally like you can find information about examples and this kind of stuff all over you can ask chat GPT for like example coding questions for an interview or system design or even behavioral questions like you have lots of resources to do this so um then most companies I've worked with told me I had the strongest interview in their company's history I can confirm it not not translate to being the best employee at the company not saying I'm bad of course okay I see sometimes they really like Experts of the little things yeah it depends right um depends on the company kind of what they're after sometimes people are really looking for that kind of thing um you don't need to bother whoever listens to this on Instagram this app is trash and so are they okay okay uh I actually am going to remove uh that because I don't think that that's that's not okay and I don't know how to remove that so I have to remove that I'm sorry I can't have that in my chat um yeah I apologize I didn't mean for that to be up in chat for so long that's uh 100% not okay let me go ahead and uh that's kind of embarrassing I'm trying to remove it from my chat and it's not working so oh boy okay let's see if this refreshed no okay I'm keeping the chat still works for I'm just not going to show it cuz it only takes one person to kind of ruin it so I apologize for folks that were reading the chat um I I don't have any words for that kind of thing but that's just not cool um lost a lost a subscriber and that's okay please don't ever do that okay let's go back to getting on track here um and sorry Vall on on Instagram how can I get interviews at Big Tech as I had referral from SD S2s as well what do you recommend um the thing someone asked me this the other day about referrals and my thoughts on them depends right if you have referrals depends what the referral looks like so the example I gave is I know that some people if you ask them for referrals they'll just if they're company like doesn't need a lot of details I'll just give you a referral and if someone I'm just being honest here if someone came to me and said hey I'm referring this person and I said great like tell me about them and they're like I don't know I just referred them like I've never worked with them that wouldn't that would carry Z8 to me like I that doesn't that doesn't do anything so um if if instead if the referral is someone speaking highly of someone I've work with them I can vouch for them um that carries some weight to me but I'm not everyone and I'm not every company so sometimes you can have referrals I'll give you an example like I was talking about referrals even uh from me into uh to some positions that were open on a partner team and they had told me like we've already closed the loop so they've accepted the round of candidates to be my headphones fell to be they accepted the round of candidates to be interviewed already so even if I have a referral they're like doesn't matter at this point so the position like the the job posting needs to go up again in order for me to have that referral go through and even then it's up to them if they want to take it or not um can I do a quick check if anyone's on the chat I actually don't know if it's not coming through now so if you want to do me a favor and send a message in the chat just to let me know what's coming through CU I tried to block the YouTube comment and now I have this oh infected FPS perfect thank you just going to say I don't see any chat messages now and I don't know if it's busted so that good news Okay so that does work thanks folks please be kind in the chat um so referrals sometimes become a way to favor someone who didn't deserve it yeah it's all like the reality is if someone again just being transparent if uh if someone came to me with a referral it doesn't mean they they just get the job or something right so it's more just about understanding like what I would say short circuits is like if your resume is going into a pile to be reviewed either by automation or or uh recruiters or hiring managers you with a referral you might shortcircuit that path and then at least get it into the eyes of the hiring manager sooner which can carry a ton of weight but it doesn't mean that like your interview is going to be something that you you know pass with flying colors right so and like I said it doesn't even guarantee you get the interview it's just it helps bypass some of those other things this will look different everywhere as well okay so not only can coding I'm just going back to the the topic here so not only can uh coding questions like lead code style questions just kind of be a bit of a crapshoot a bit of a gamble but um the same thing can happen with behavioral questions right so this kind of thing happens all the time where you might get a question and it's a scenario that you're like I actually I actually have never experienced something like this um someone's saying if you were able to communicate the subject through the background people may stay uh which which background I don't know what they're referring to um thanks Caster but I'm not sure what you're referring to there um so with behavioral questions you might not have ever encountered it and sometimes this gets people flustered so they panic and they're just like oh I don't know and they just try to fit um cast I mean I don't know what you're talking about I'm talking about failing uh interviews I set a title on the stream I don't know I mean behind him oh you like I could put a banner behind me interesting oh thanks I that's something I didn't think about so sorry for folks that don't see it like on Tik Tok you can set up like background stuff maybe I should do this on my stream in general I appreciate that Caster try that's good advice I'll consider that for my next stream thanks um so for folks that are just joining I'll say it verbally sorry I should do a better job of this I'm not a streamer I'm a I'm a software engineering manager but um if you're just joining we're talking about failing um um we're talking about failing interviews so on the behavioral questions not only can you get stuff you've never experienced sometimes you can just draw blanks if you're like me um like I am really bad at testing and exams and uh I get flustered and draw blanks so there be a situation where someone can ask me a behavioral question and like I might go I know I have a good project to talk through for this and like it's just not coming to me um so you can have situations like that um sometimes these things like I said they can feel like they're just outside of your control another one I wanted to call out is that um yes it's entirely possible that you just have interviewers that are challenging to work with and I kind of hinted at this earlier in the talk but um I have been on panels I've been you know I've been engineering manager for 12 years been interviewing that whole time and the the point that I want to get across here is like when you're when we go to do the debriefs and we're coming together and talking through how the interview went I have absolutely talked with other people that were part of the interview Loop and been like I don't think that that was a fair way to assess this person um so I think that's um you know something something to think about is like sometimes that's just outside of your control so as we're going through all this you might be thinking like man like this totally sucks because I'm going to go through all this effort I'm going to finally get that interview and then what I'm going to have all these things that don't work in my favor and it's going to totally suck so like no but you you might fail it and that's it's okay so now that we're getting past this I want to mention it's okay and I want to walk you through my big failure before Microsoft because I think it's a I think it's an interesting one because I totally had this failed interview so this will be um I'll go into more detail in my YouTube video that's hopefully out on Wednesday it's about 20 minutes long on this exact topic specifically this interview that I had but uh I want to share it with you because because it's real I can't remember all the exact details like the exact act question and stuff but I totally bomb this and I think it's important that you hear that like you you I don't know depending where you're coming from uh if you see me on LinkedIn and stuff you might say oh like look he's successful at Microsoft but like like yeah it doesn't mean I don't fail interviews it's you know it's a thing that happens so I wanted to talk through this because I think that it's helpful for other people to hear so um before I got my job at Microsoft I was actually applying to a bunch of big tech companies so I appli to like you know to Amazon to Google to Facebook to Microsoft and uh in my my process I was fortunate enough that I had interviews lined up for all these places which is cool so that's great but um Google was the first one out of the group to start scheduling the interviews for me so okay um the context that I need to add here is that I hadn't interviewed in8 years so in interviewing is a skill and if you get where I'm going with this um I was absolutely like new to interviewing I hadn't I used to do it all the time for my internships in University I had six internships and every four months you would be interviewing for your Co-op position so I used to do it a ton but I hadn't for eight years and not only that like big Tech in particular has like like I've been describing like you have like these lead code style questions you have your system design stuff I'm like man I don't know what I'm doing so I had to spend a lot of time practicing I had to make sure I was practicing lead Code system design my behavioral stuff but it's like you have to practice a ton so I knew that this was going to be something I was wildly uncomfortable with but kind of got to do it okay so that's the what I want to frame this up with so my my Google interview I think it was five rounds could have been four uh but I had one coding question I had I believe two system design questions and then the remaining were all behavioral interviews and this was for a software engineering manager position so when I applied to Big Tech it was only software engineering management positions so as I'm telling you this I think all that's really going to change is like the types of questions that I was getting asked so if you're a junior software engineer or a senior software engineer you probably see a similar type of thing okay so it's not going to change it too much but um I had when I was going into this I thought okay my experience as an engineering manager I feel like on the behavioral interview questions like I think I got this and I felt pretty confident because like I said I had been interviewing other people for a long time and all that I had to really do was make sure that I could recall scenarios like well like effectively because if someone's asking me a behavioral question I think I can do a decent job of figuring out what they're trying to ask for and they're trying to learn and as long as I don't draw a blank uh and like say I only had one scenario to work with if I drew a blank I'd be screwed so I just tried to make sure I had a bunch of scenarios that I could pick and choose from so that's how I practiced for those ones but it wasn't so bad and I thought that I would do well on that part one of the other things I thought I would do at least okay at like I'm not good at leite code because I don't do it but I figured at least for me as a software engineering manager my role was a little bit unique for those eight years because I was coding every single day at the same time so some engineering managers just don't write code anymore and in fact like I don't write code in my day job at Microsoft for the past four years at Microsoft I don't write code I code every single day outside of work but at Microsoft I don't and this previous role I was coding every every single day so I figured okay one of my places to shine in my interview is if I can nail that coding question I'm set right I'm going to hopefully nail the coding question hopefully nail the behavioral stuff and the system design pieces I can say like like I can navigate my way through I'm hoping hey ex coding good to see you uh I appreciate that you are always joining the stream so thanks a lot means a lot to me so in this situation I'm like okay I think the sort of the gamble is going to be with these system design questions because I'm not really sure what I'm getting myself into so to kick things off my first interview out of all of these uh out of this interview Loop let's call it the first one was the coding question and I remember I can't remember the exact question but I remember hearing it and being like okay I don't know it off the top of my head like I don't have like a you know instantly I'm going to go code this thing up so I did what uh I feel like is recommended in a lot of interviews which is to ask clarifying questions if you just make assumptions and start coding things like you might just go down the wrong path so ask some clarifying questions and then I said to the interviewer okay I think that I have a like a naive or you know a basic solution that should work for this so I'd like to try walking you through coding that first and then I want to try and optimize it so that was the approach I had because I would much rather have something that works that needs to be optimized versus like not writing anything down so I remember coding it up and explaining it and walking through the test cases and then kind of looking at the time and being like I'm not going to have time to optimize this so I just remember saying to the interviewer okay like um here's why I think that this is inefficient and like here's the area that I think that I need to focus on to improve it uh and kind of that's as far as I got so at the end of the coding interview I was pretty frustrated because I felt like I totally dropped the ball on being able to demonstrate my coding abilities like no I didn't like fumble and like forgot how to do an if statement or something but I just feel like this person was probably like oh man like this guy can't even figure this question out like so I felt kind of embarrassed I felt frustrated and um the part that really sucked for me was like well two parts right one that's an area I was really hoping to shine number two that was the beginning of the day and I got four more interviews to go and I've already felt like like man I I I screwed that up so uh and ex coding and others that are just joining right now this whole talk is about failing interviews and uh I'm sharing my experience right now with failing a Google interview and then after I'm going to talk about sort of my advice for people that have failed interviews what you can do and kind of move forward from that so um someone and I I understand the advice now someone on Tik Tok was actually saying I should try to put like a a banner up I never thought about this but when people are joining the stream they can just see like what I'm talking about obviously I'm not a good streamer so I'm working on it but okay so that was the first interview of the five and I'm like I'm already screwed okay next up though I have system design questions and to be totally honest I can't remember the first system design question I had but it was a pretty like typical like um there was like a database involved distributed system I think there were payments and usually when you have payments and stuff you want to talk about like transactions and sagas and this idea that when you're building this type of system you need to make sure that if a payment's going through like you're not um you're not basically charging people for stuff that they're not getting or you're not uh Missing the charge or you're not like double charging so like there's some interesting constraints around that but um that one I feel like I feel like when I was talking with the interviewer there wasn't a moment where I was like oh man like I totally screwed this up so I feel like that one actually went pretty well maybe it wasn't perfect but I I didn't leave that one feeling like dude like you know cover your face because you totally bombed that one so so far you know I'm like one out of two for my interviews okay so I kind of like recovering a little bit that's not so bad and then the third question that I had to go in was another system design question and spoiler alert this is the one that I am confident caused me to fail this whole thing so this question was about uh and context I had worked in digital forensics software for eight years prior it was all desktop software um a little bit of stuff in the cloud but certainly not big distributed systems with data centers and um this question was about literally machines communicating in a data center um trying to talk about uh different ways to like effectively Route traffic and the uh I just remember when the interviewer started explaining this I remember thinking like I don't know anything about this question like that was the first thing that came to mind was like I don't even know where to start um oh Baron joined on on Tik Tok also whenever I had a big interview even my stable inter internet connection becomes so bad yeah it's everything just everything goes bad um so this question I just remember thinking okay I don't know the answer at all but what's the advice I've always had for going through interviews it's like just try to keep moving things forward and especially with system design questions a lot of the time you will get open-ended questions and it's on purpose and it's because the interviewer is expecting that you will ask clarifying questions to understand the constraints and requirements of the system so when I got this question I was like number one I have no idea what this is about but number two I still have this opportunity to be asking questions right this is my time to go clarify as much as I can and that's what I did I asked him questions back to try and get constraints for it um and then from there I told the interview where I said I'm going to try answering this to the best of my abilities uh and I expect that I'm going to get a little bit stuck stuck so I probably have some some followup questions and he said okay so I started to answer it um in spiritual mind we're going through um failing interviews and what to do after that so I'm just sharing my story for failing my Google interview from before Microsoft so I started answering this guy's question and I remember thinking like it's not going good like I knew like five minutes in I'm like this is not going to be an okay question so inevitably I got to a point where I said okay like here's what I'm thinking here's why and I could tell that he's just like sitting there not impressed like waiting for more and I'm like okay uh time for more clarifying questions and I kept doing this and I kept trying to progress my answer but watching his body language and stuff I'm like he's he's looking for more and he's looking for something that I'm not giving him so towards the end of that interview uh I just remember being in this position where I'm like that's I've kind of exhausted like what I'm able to do in terms of asking for more clarifying questions he's not really giving me anymore so we had a little bit of time left in the interview and I remember saying to him like Hey like um would you mind like explaining to me like uh sort of your perspective on what you were hoping I would go further and deeper on so he explained to me and again I can't remember the exact details of the question but what he was looking for was at some level I needed to have an understanding of the uh the network cards specifically like the network interfaces on the cards inside of the machines in the data center and for context I was not I was not applying for a role that needed to know anything about machines in the data center at all so I think at this point when I kind of heard him say that and like knowing that I totally bombed that part of the interview I just remember being like I'm pretty mad like that feels very unfair it feels like I got set up with a person that was asking me a question that I was never going to pass and even if I studied as many system design questions as I possibly could I never would have passed that like I wasn't studying uh anything about hardware for machines than a data center so I just remember being like pretty upset about that but I'm not done the interview I still got to go through the behavioral ones and uh we're not going to focus on those for this for this conversation cuz it's not really the point of it but those ones went well so I got to shine during those and that part was great that's not the focus of this conversation because this is all about failing so um I remember finishing that being like okay we recap coding one at the beginning bomb that system design question after that did okay bomb the next one and then did good on the behavioral ones and in my head I'm going okay they're hiring an engineering manager engineering managers need to have technical background but we spend most of our time dealing with people related things and there's different places that we'll say and people have different opinions about this like engineering managers have to be super technical whatever like you need to have a technical understanding no doubt but most of the time we're not writing code in our roles and if you are I would say you're not doing an effective job managing people or you don't have many people to manage as me how I know cuz I've done it for 12 years and eight of those years I wrote code and manage people and the only way I could do it was working like 60 to 80 hours a week you don't have time to do both effectively so I was thinking okay coding one didn't do so well system design one didn't do so well but maybe like it was impressive enough on the other side that I did okay maybe but no so the recruiter ended up giving me the feedback and he said it's going to be a know from us um so wasn't totally shocked was kind of anticipating that unfortunate as it is um and he said we thought that you did amazing on like the sort of the people and the project side of things like you definitely have experiencing experience managing teams and things like that managing projects so I was like okay like pat on the back like that's the part I thought I was definitely going to rock so that's good um and then the this is the part that I really didn't like but he said we just we felt that you weren't techn techical enough and I remember being like Oh like come on man um and I'll tell you why I don't like that answer um and I know why I got the answer it's because I bomb those questions like that's why that's what they use to gauge whether or not I was technical but the part that really bothered me was like I've been at that point professionally programming for uh what how many years is that for for 10 years professionally programming 17 years of programming in general I code every single day I had two two patents two more pending um I had built a lot of the like original parts of products for the forensic company I was at and I was like there's no way that I'm not technical so it was really like frustrating to hear that like what do you mean I'm not technical enough uh I'm going to answer this question in the chat though can you please share how you prepare for interview what's your preparation strategy what things do you revise so yes spiritual mind I will touch on that in just a moment um I want to see if I can wrap up the the Google part and then I'm going to come back to this because this is a really good question I want to get that cleared up for folks so the the part that I just want to mention kind of briefly at this point is like okay so I don't get the job with Google bummer right and I kind of I've been purposefully trying to touch on a few different emotions that I experienced because if you have failed interviews you've probably felt some of these emotions at different points in time and I wanted to say these out loud because I'm hoping that if you're watching or listening you'll go at least for some of you right you'll say I I remember feeling that way I remember feeling like for me I was sad I was sad I didn't get that job because I thought that I would be able to demonstrate my abilities something that I wanted and not getting it I was sad right I mentioned that I was frustrated at different points I was angry at one point um like I should have mentioned confused confusion is a good thing like to describe that all of these things are normal emotions to feel and I wanted to say that because I think some people like almost feel like ashamed of feeling some of those things or like you're not allowed to feel that way but like you absolutely are allowed to have an emotional response however you need to like kind of limited at some point right so it's okay to feel the emotions but what we do after that is what matters right so before I go to answer spiritual mind's question in the chat which you can't see uh am I able to pull this back up now I'm really sorry if that foul stuff is still there give me one sec we're good okay oh man so chat's back folks if you want to type in the chat um I apologize for the earlier uh mess um so before I answer spiritual mind's question I just wanted to say like after you have those you know feel those emotions acknowledge them you have to go through this process of understanding like and I talked about this at the beginning of this this talk like what things are in your control and what things aren't because that's why I put that at the beginning of this talk what's not in my control I don't get to pick the questions I don't get to pick my interviewers I don't get to pick whether or not someone else happened to do awesome that day these things are not in my control so once you start to acknowledge okay why am I feeling sad about this I didn't get the interview okay like acknowledge that that's an okay feeling to have but now you have to understand like it's already done there's literally nothing in your control to change that that past event so do you put more energy into it or do you stop I recommend you don't put any more energy into it um the next part like the frustration right or like feeling angry about those questions those things are not in my control at all so okay acknowledge why you're having that feeling but try to understand that's because of something that's not in your control okay don't put more energy into it so I think it's important to have that those emotions acknowledge them and then see why you're having them and then make a decision about whether or not that's in your control because all of the things that aren't in your control investing more time and energy into the stuff that's not in your control is not going to help you but if we can start to identify the things that are in our control that's what we need to focus on so back to spiritual mind's question in the chat can you please share how you prepare for interviews what's your preparation strategy what things do you revise Okay so this is um a big answer to this the um the three major areas that you have in say like a big Tech interview or in general most uh most interviews are kind of like this um just checking chat sorry uh you have coding questions you have system design questions and behavioral interview questions uh for your coding questions I would say lead code or ask chat GPT for example interview questions um you could even if you're asking chat GPT or your favorite llm you could even say for uh a developer working in this language and uh at this uh level right it can probably tailor something that's going to help and I would practice those questions and I said this earlier in the live stream but I think that um sorry lost my train of thought for your oh for for lead code questions like it's it's like a unique skill set so I think you should be practicing them and they're going to help for your interviews but like that's why you're practicing them so that's what I would do for that part on the system design one you could literally go looking at like you can search on Google or bang whatever you want to use um you can find examples system design questions uh same thing with asking an llm for both of these I recom commend that you practice talking them out so don't just sit there and draw it out and like that's it like literally talk like you heard of rubber ducking when you're programming like I'm trying to look on my desk to see if there's anything I can pick up but I don't have anything super interesting so no um talk to something on your desk right pick up something put it up and talk to it so when you're answering the question you can be debugging the question to something on your desk for your system design questions do the same thing uh strategy that I like to use is that I will make lists of questions and I answer them top to bottom and as soon as I get stuck I go the opposite way work bottom to top and that helps me not get to a point where I'm memorizing things because there's too much randomization because as soon as I start to memorize things I'm like I'm not going to get one of these questions on the interview I have to understand it so I can't just be memorizing and then the final thing for Behavioral interviews um I did plug my course earlier I will um put it back in the chat if you have not seen the link if you're just joining um this is a course that I just launched today with Ryan Murphy uh for working through behavioral interviews the advice there is uh high level you want to research the companies that you're applying for you want to understand their key competencies their uh like their the core things that they focus on and a lot of big tech companies publish this stuff like Amazon has leadership principles right that's a well-known thing it's published on their website you want to go through those and you want to again you can use an llm for this actually I have a free resource for this one sec let me put this into the chat too um I I want to get I always give people a heads up on this one because it's not obvious but um this product which I'm going to link when you go if you go to check it out it's free it says to name a price you can put and I recommend you put zero it's literally 0 so don't pay anything it's just a PDF I repeat do not pay anything but you add it to your cart put $0 in it's a PDF and it's just an example of using a prompt there's no magic um and you can get uh an like chat GPT or Claude or whatever you want to use to give you example interview questions so there's that as a resource uh Buran I did see your question on Tik Tok I will come back to that in just a sec so for the behavioral questions I do the same thing where I make lists of them related to the key competencies and I also try to make sure that I have scenarios from my experience that line up with the key competencies so for example um customer focus is a common key competency or um communication or collaboration teamwork these types of things so I try to make sure I have different scenarios for my work experience that I can highlight these types of things and then I do what I said for the Pro or for the coding ones and the system design I literally talk to something or if you have someone you can talk to even better and go through these questions and you just want to make sure that it's feeling natural as you're answering them and you want to make sure that you're focused on what the goal of the question is not just spending time talking about the details of the technology because behavioral interviews are focused on getting information about Behavior not how amazing and how cool this technology is that you got to work on so just a heads up so Spirit spiritual mind I hope that helps um what things do you revise um I would say that that's based on feedback in practice or if I fail an interview which is what we're going to talk about right now um that's where I'll go through what I failed and see where I need to adjust uh Buran so how important is asking interviewers a few questions at the end of the interview um I think it's a really good opportunity um but I have a like my perspective on this like there's a couple aspects um and I always try to clarify like I have my opinion and my opinion can be very different than the next person so um the recommendation I have is that if you have time to ask questions you should be asking questions um I think sometimes people have this expectation that like you need to impress the interviewer like you need to have a question that's going to be so impressive to the interviewer where they're like oh like such a good question like you so like good job on you for doing that um I don't really feel that way um I think there's types of questions that you can ask that show that you are genuinely curious in the role that makes the interviewer feel that you are um that you're genuinely interested like it's not just another you know interview you're going through it's like you're paying attention to the products or the um like the vision the direction the companies going that kind of stuff so I think there's things that can stand out that way and those might be good questions my personal recommendation I said this earlier that I like interviews feeling more like a conversation and I basically tell interviewees like when there's time at the end I literally I don't I don't know if anyone I've ever interviewed will watch these but I say to people at the end I say you got about X number of minutes left and I'm happy to answer any questions you have except math questions because I mean it like I'm not going to answer math questions because I hate them but I'll answer anything they want to know about the about the company that I can answer the team what we work on any that I'm able to that they're curious about I want to help answer for them so and even the the student I was talking to yesterday the advice that I gave him was like I I kind of he because he was asking about this and I turned it around and I said like look like I don't want this to sound sarcastic so I don't I don't mean for it to sound like fous at all but like when you're applying to these jobs and getting these interviews like you want to work there right he's like yeah and I said okay like name me a couple companies like for your internships if you could go work at them like you'd be excited to go work there so he listed a couple and I said great okay so like and he he caught himself he he named a company he was like no he's like I think I just said that because of like the name he's like but here's another one that like I want to work there because of X I said great so you've identified companies that you want to work at and I said now imagine that you have an opportunity to ask someone who works there very closely to the space you would be in I said imagine you got that job so when you're asked this you're put in this position to ask questions imagine that you just got the job what are you curious about right like what are you genuinely curious about and instead of trying to think of like what's a question that will impress someone like it's I I go into as the interviewer I go into that part of the interview thinking I need to sell this position to the interviewee I want to make sure that they're impressed like they're like hell yeah this is going to be a cool spot to work that's what I'm hoping to do that's what I'm prepared for so if they're like hey can you tell me about the Team Dynamics I'm like oh here we go like you're going to be working with these awesome people here's how things look uh or you know what is a typical day look like and I'm like you're going to be in meetings all day no I'm just kidding but I want to make sure that they they have an understanding and this opportunity to to know what it's going to be like to be on the job so that's my recommendation for questions at the end of interviews is like if you're talking to someone like me I just want to make sure that you you get the information you want um in another case is I think showing curiosity and genuine interest in the job is uh is what can shine there um yeah and then as you mentioned and sorry folks you can't see this in the shared chat because it's Tik Tok but uh yeah it's also good to show them that you are on the same page with them 100% so it's like this good alignment opportunity at the end um but that's what I would recommend for that okay last little part of this is like okay um the I where I ended off was so you just finished bombing the interview you kind of went through your emotions and got to reflect on them we got to think about what's in our control and what's not actually we only talked about what's not in our control now it's time to to actually ask yourself like what is in your control and in my example I was like I didn't do well on that coding question like that felt it felt embarrassing to me because I'm like I know that I can program well no doubt in my mind I program all the time not saying that to be cocky but I'm just like I know that I can do better than that but I suck at lead code guess what more lead code it is right like do more so that's what I made sure when I was practicing for interviews after that just keep doing more Elite code because that's clearly a weakness in how I interview the next part was on the system design part I had to do this reflection and I said look the the situation that required me to know about the network card I'm like that's something that I'm not ever going to know and I I'm not going to sit here and put more energy into being upset about that so forget that question I think that that was like sort of luck of the draw is what I would chalk it up to had an interviewer that wasn't super helpful had a question that was pretty crappy and I bombed it okay that sucks but the other one that I had I thought that I answered decently but if I'm being honest I don't think that I was super comfortable so I said I still need more of that kind of um exposure that type of experience and practicing and I said maybe it's a good idea that instead of in my practice that I'm just talking about these like very hypothetical situations almost like theoretical like why don't I start trying to think about them in more practical sense and maybe that would mean that if I'm thinking more about like what is a physical representation of this look like if we're talking about um a service that is cross geolocated like I have to think about data centers now like what does this look like physically um I told myself get a little bit more practical with the examples and maybe if you get another kind of weird question at least you can rationalize things a little bit more clearly um and maybe that will help so I needed to make sure that I was focusing on those things and I told myself that um the behavioral stuff I did well and it doesn't mean that I need zero practice but it means if I have X amount of hours to practice for my interviews I don't need to use as much time for the behavioral stuff so that's what was in my control what um just Halo what is code for uses do share more uh by the way the code for uses edu are really cool I'm not sure what that is so please feel free to share in the chat sounds interesting if others can benefit from that that would be cool okay so now we know what things are under control so you have to do this reflection process and figure out how you're going to make adjustments right I listed the things that were my control the adjustments I needed to make were which areas I was going to focus on and then from there it's time to go put it into practice so that's roughly where I'm going to wrap things up the point that I want to remind people of is like it's important that if you I want to say like if and when I I don't want to say if you fail an interview I think there's going to be a situation where you don't do well in an interview and it's okay it's not the end of the world it's going to feel bad and I'm not trying to minimize your feelings for it's going to feel bad but if you do the things I talked about right if you can think about what's in your control and what's not now you're back in a position where you can make decisions about what you can do better for yourself that means you can move forward and you can make improvements so instead of sitting there being upset and then being like well I don't want to apply to any more jobs I don't want to go do that other interview that's scheduled instead of being in a situation like that you're already trying to focus on what you need to do to get better and it's not easy so I don't want to sit here and pretend like hey don't hey don't worry it's so easy just like don't feel sad and like did you try not being sad and just coding more like I'm not saying that but I am saying that like acknowledge your emotions and then we have to move on and try to get better and I can assure you I feel very confident saying this that if you're constant L looking at the ways that you can improve and practicing more statistically you're going to end up Landing that interview you're going to land that job and you're going to be able to move on from it so that's all that I wanted to share um code force is a competitive programming platform awesome might be something cool for folks to check out if you have not seen that if you're into that kind of thing sounds interesting it's not my jam I like just building stuff but if you like doing competitive programming that could be cool but um folks this is uh the time usually I jump over to Reddit I don't think I'm going to do that again this week I know I didn't do it last week um but I am going to be live streaming in the morning so uh I figured I might do my last uh rounds of advertisements once more uh and remind you that I'll be live streaming in the morning so this is your chance if you have questions um I will stay on and answer questions uh if you keep putting them in here um I think it's still really hard right now due to hiring freezes and mass layoffs even if you do all the right things and are crushing all the questions maybe still no job 100% And and thanks Elemental Magic card game for this because like if we think about what I was saying right like what parts of that are in your control the hiring freezes are not in your control right the mass layoffs are not in your control okay these things suck and I'm not saying that they don't suck but they're not in our control so what can we do we can keep practicing we can keep looking at the areas where our strengths and weaknesses are and we focus more on the weaknesses we keep polishing the strengths and keep bringing up the weaknesses and that means that when we get these opportunities when they do come up we'll be prepared and we'll do better so thank you I think that's a really good point um and again I'm I'm checking Instagram I see your your message there thank you um and if anyone else has questions before I sign off please just dump them in the chat I will keep answering them as we go here is learning backend development uh this is on Instagram uh from aif um is learning back in development worth it in 2024 to get a highp paying remote job hell yeah I don't I don't agree with anyone saying like like uh sorry I'm not laughing at you I mean I'm not I don't agree with people that are saying like AI is going to take all the jobs um it's going to transform how we're doing things I think there's I work with a ton of people that do backend development I work in an entire area of Microsoft that's literally just backend development um like hundreds and hundreds of people and it's it literally keeps Office 365 going and it's tons of work lots of super cool stuff lots of really interesting things going on I think there's tons of opportunity there I think there's a lot of competition would say if I had to guess I don't have stats on this I think there's a lot more competition in frontend work and the reason I say that is because I think there are many people many people who want to get into software engineering and they start with some type of frontend development and then if you were to look at the number of people that start off that way the number is just disproportionately greater than people that are like I want to go start working in backend coding and I think it's because it's less sexy like you don't get to see the changes it might not seem that cool but when you're working in front and you get to see everything that's happening so I think there's tons of opportunity in back end um and I'm not a person that believes that AI is going to replace our jobs um I think it will transform our jobs for sure 100% uh it will continue to do so and I think that if you're staying on top of AI and always looking at what AI is sort of obsoleting for you we making easy for you like the mundane work goes away great you get to focus on a higher level problems so will it evolve yes uh is it going away I don't think so anytime soon so hopefully a sheep hopefully that helps thank you for the question um Buran uh you're very welcome I hope that is a good start to your day and I do appreciate you joining here so thanks for much um so let's see back to Twitch here so the way I AI will take jobs is to cause companies to hire more programs to develop AI products the actual AI itself won't do anything uh to speak of I'm I'm kind of of this mindset right there's going to be I've talked about this before I think and I kind of just hinted at it but I think AI will replace mundane things the more advanced AI gets the more those the level of like what's mundane um and repent and boring like the more things that it can do but we're always going to need people to be doing these things and you say okay well what about the AI agents and it's like sure okay but until someone has a ton of AI agents replacing a software company like like is it possible but like sure but I don't know man I don't I don't see that being I think that would be more infuriating to if you were to look at the conversation between AI agents trying to build products probably be going in circles like crazy uh not to say we don't as humans but I I think that we're a long way off from that being something to be concerned about personally um Sam K hello good to see you I am sorry that we're basically about to sign off here so thank you for joining but we are towards the end here um and then Elemental Magic card game was saying if you're not a machine learning specialist even less chance for a job yeah I I think that there's still lots of opportunities though right um You got people that are trying to it's like it's the hot thing to be on the side of AI that you're helping produce like the systems for the models and advancing that technology without a doubt like that's that's a hot spot right now but it's like there's still going to be people that are building with this stuff so uh and there's lots of things to build the the reality is there's so many problems out there to go solve that I'm just not con concern that these jobs go away the big tricky thing has been things like hiring freezes there's been uh I'm don't want to get into like politics and stuff because it's not what I like to talk about but the the idea around like interest rates like when interest rates are high it's difficult for big tech companies and I don't know all of the the information and data points around this but if you read about how like basically big tech companies are able to leverage uh to use leverage to to grow right and when interest rates are high it's very difficult to do when they're low they can do it a lot more effectively so when we're in these situations where interest rates are high it's a lot trickier to have a lot of uh explosive growth in big Tech so something to think about uh but these things will change so I'm not not concerned um it's hard right now and I don't want to dismiss that um you know I I always want to acknowledge I'm fortunate to be in the position I'm in so I don't mean to talk about this and disregard other people I think that's unfair um but I do think that again if we think about what's in our control you have to focus on what you can put your energy into we're not going to we can't sit around and be upset that it's hard to get jobs like yes acknowledge that and then and then realize that part's not in your control what's in your control you can keep building you can keep practicing uh your interviews you can be refining your resume you can be networking with people there are so many things that you can and should be doing and then as the circumstances start to change as you get more opportunities getting your resumés out to places things will work out okay um my last little Spiel I kind of did an ad earlier but I will do it to sign off so thanks for sticking through this with me um so this is my newsletter if I scroll back up it's at uh weekly. deev leader.com just so you can see it on substack uh there's other entries here uh substack does also allow me to import my podcast which I will plug very briefly here sorry flashbang warning um my podcast is where I talk about uh software engineering topics with different individuals um I've had some really interesting people on and it's it's really exciting for me to be able to do this if you want to hear about different people's software engineering Journeys and in the areas that they focus on uh I think that this is worth checking out um you can find it on Spotify it's on uh Apple podcasts I don't know what that's called um yeah it's it's everywhere podcasts are um thanks Sam I appreciate that and so you can definitely check out the podcast it's one of those things like they're usually like 40 minutes to an hour long if you just want to hear a conversation like instead of me talking at you like this it's uh it's me interviewing someone in like a conversational setting uh one of the last people I interviewed was uh Rita eaus uh she's a she's a pretty big content creator on uh on Tik Tok on Instagram and and Twitter and she got a really cool story like she came from an acting background and I was very surprised how much of like her like theater and acting experiences really tied well into software engineering I thought it was super cool uh I interviewed Ethan Evans uh Ethan Evans is an x uh Amazon VP he I I don't want to say unfortunately maybe fortunately depends how you look at it he went pretty viral on social media a couple weeks ago I'm not going to share exactly why but if you go search Ethan Evans uh I got to have a conversation with him was really cool I'm not trying to skim over people but um yeah I'm just kind of scrolling there's lots of awesome people I've got to chat with uh Scott Hanselman is probably sort of like the biggest like call I like to call him a celebrity in my opinion so um like a celebrity uh guest that I've had so it's been really fun to do that um I'll plug this which is my code commute YouTube channel so if you're watching this you probably already know I have my normal YouTube channel code commute is one where I talk to you while I'm driving um it's not a live stream it's just a vlog so uh I sit in traffic and I get upset about traffic and then I talk to you about software engineering and I decided to do it it's been pretty fun um there's some videos like this one they get more views than my Channel with 7,000 subscribers so some people like it it's pretty fun and then um quick plug on brand ghost if you're interested in content creation uh brand ghost is the SAS that I'm building if you see how I create content online and that seems interesting to you or if you have a small business and you're like dude I don't want to dedicate time to like posting content on social media platforms brand ghost could be a huge help for you but this is what I'm building on the side so the fact that I'm not blogging anymore is because I'm writing code instead of writing blogs and it's all for brand ghost and finally the last thing I'll mention and I showed this earlier this is the nailing the behavioral interview course on dome train currently 30% off so uh check that out and this is basically a lot of what I talked about this evening and the curriculum all here it's 6 hours long I did this with Ryan Murphy uh Ryan's an awesome guy so we have more courses coming to dome train uh from this perspective because historically Dom train is a lot of c and net and Ryan and I are going to be building out this other part of the the sort of offering so uh feel free to check that out that's freshly launched and I see one more question no that's okay thank you um you got to be careful with the chat okay folks I think that's it thanks for um thanks for listening to me blab about the ads and stuff I appreciate that um I think that's all so if you are up bright and early or maybe you're at the opposite side of the world and it's just a more convenient time 7 a.m. PST give or take a couple of minutes because I have a call right before that I want to be online talking about Azure blob storage uh we're going to make a little application that can put stuff into blob storage we'll take the bites back out we will talk about um SAS URLs which is pretty cool and uh this is a format that I've done before where I'm not going to how do I say this I'm going to be kind of going through the topics that I will make a YouTube tutorial about so you'll get to see me mess around with it screw some things up it's going to be rough it always is and then uh I will release like polish YouTube tutorials to follow up on that so if you check out the live stream and you're like okay this is fun but I'm kind of lost or if you miss it that's okay cuz the tutorials will go live um hopefully this week and if not then early next week and uh yeah they'll be on Azure blob storage so thank you so much folks I think that's it I don't see any other questions as I kind of poke around here uh I do appreciate all the questions that come in um you know you guys you guys make this because otherwise I'd be talking to no one and might as well be my YouTube videos right so I do appreciate you being here thanks for showing up thanks for the folks that keep coming back uh it's it's hon it's weird it's like it's really cool to see that uh there's some folks that keep coming back because I don't know like I've never met you but it's uh it feels good um and I'm and I'm happy that it's uh hopefully helpful for you so before I get emotional we'll sign off here thanks again folks see you bright and early