Date & Time: Friday, May 26th, 11am - 2pm,
Venue: ATC 203 - Main Lab in the Advanced Technology Center, De Anza College
Agenda:
Erik's recent experience with actual job search
Mike's standard discussion of how to approach early-career job searches and why one would/wouldn't want to start with startups
Discussion of value of LeetCode and similar question banks, given the presence of ChatGPT in the landscape
Walkthrough of example non-coding interview question
- selecting data structures suitable for a problem
- analyzing for big-O performance.
- identifying what parts of the problem the candidate is supposed to be able to notice for themselves
Walkthrough of coding interview question: simple implementation of a spreadsheet API
- Identifying implementation tradeoffs
- Real-world vs. during-interview code quality
- Time management - just enough tests to prove it's working, not so many the clock runs out
Q&A session
Mike has been a backend software engineer on Unix systems for a little over thirty-three years. His early career was a completely unplanned pinball tour of ten different startups over thirteen years, followed by 5.5 years at PayPal, 2.5 at AdBrite (one last startup; 500M ad views/day), and 12 at Google, in the Search, Payments, and Engineering Education departments. As of May 2023, he will be starting as a Staff Software Engineer at Slack.
Erik is a software engineer with a nontraditional path into tech. As a De Anza alum, he pivoted from healthcare into tech after obtaining his bachelor’s from UCI. After building a foundation in programming and a portfolio of projects, he joined Google as a software engineer on their Engineering Education team. He is currently looking for new opportunities and actively applying to new positions.
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