DEV Community: Sam Perozek

First Tech Interview? Here's My Experience

Sam Perozek — Sun, 11 Sep 2022 19:55:38 +0000

So you’re making a career pivot? Getting into tech and you have your first interview – are you excited or nervous? I’ll be the first to admit that I was both – I wanted to share my experience with the interview process to serve as a reference for anybody facing a similar situation.

All of the interviews that I’ve had consisted of the same general structure:

Three Rounds:

Round 1: Recruiter/HR Introduction

Duration: 30-45 minutes

This round is a great opportunity to introduce yourself to the recruiter and offer your backstory. I would run through my elevator pitch with a brief summary of my resume and would ask the recruiter if they wanted me to elaborate on anything in particular. The interview would wrap up with the recruiter running through more details about the company, and then I’d try to ask a few questions based on what the recruiter shared.

This round was usually conducted over the phone in a semi-formal manner. I found that the interview process was more casual for the larger companies.

I really enjoyed all of my first round interviews – it offered immediate feedback on the type of culture that the company promotes. Although most of us are trying our best to get into tech, it’s important to remember that interviews are a two-way street. YOU want to make sure that you’d enjoy working for the company in the long run, or you’re setting yourself up for a whirlwind of unnecessary stress (because we all don’t have enough stress already, right?).

Key Advice
· I would try to read through the recruiter’s LinkedIn before the interview and would target a question or two based on the recruiter’s background.
· Come prepared with several questions regarding the company itself – show the recruiter that you are interested in the company beyond just getting a job in tech.

Round 2: Technical Interview w/Senior Devs

Duration: 60-120 minutes

For me personally, this round was the most intimidating. You don’t necessarily know what to expect. I expected to be thrown into the code-challenge gauntlet as soon as the interview started, and that wasn’t necessarily the case. Although some did, most interviews started with a review of the projects that I had completed or was currently working on. The senior developers would ask questions based on the code that I was presenting. For the questions that I didn’t have an answer to, I would be honest and tell them that I didn’t know, and would ask if they could explain it. Almost every time I did, the senior developer would happily explain. If they didn’t, remember that this is still a 2-way interview, and may reflect on the company culture as a whole. (I wouldn’t want to work with anyone who refuses to answer questions).

The project review was generally following by a code challenge. These varied widely, and I was given the choice of using my preferred language. The best advice that I can offer here is to try your best. Stay relaxed – the interviewers know that most folks are going to be nervous. Trust your training – you’ve likely spent hundreds of hours learning. If you get stuck, ask the interviewers for help! This is SO important. Do not sit there struggling without asking for help. Part of the interview is evaluating your ability to ask technical based questions.

Even if you ultimately don’t pass the technical challenge, it is great practice for ultimately furthering your career. It happens! The most important thing is that you’ve built a good relationship with a company and recruiter. You can continue studying and come back and try again (if you’d like). These interviews are designed to be relatively challenging, so trust in yourself and your abilities!

Key Advice
·      Come prepared – make sure that you are ready to talk through your projects. Clean up your GitHub and make sure that the necessary repositories are public vs. private.
·      If you get stuck during the code challenge, don’t be afraid to ask your interviewers for help! The worst thing that you can do is to struggle in silence.

Round 3: Executive Interview

Duration: 30-45 minutes

This was my favorite part of the interview process. It was always such a good feeling to make it through the technical interview. Imposter syndrome is very real in the tech community, and passing the technical round affirmed that I deserved to be there!

This round usually consisted of meeting with an executive to be evaluated based on the company culture. The questions were more behavioral based. I found that they would usually leave a generous amount of time for questions, so make sure to come prepared! All of the executives that I met with were very easy to talk to, so don’t feel intimidated! It was great being able to ask questions regarding the future vision for the company from somebody in the c-suite.

Key Advice
·      Similar to the recruiting round, research the executive(s) prior to the interview and come prepared with a question or two based on their background.
·      Research the company itself and ask company related questions that you are genuinely interested in. If you can’t come up with any questions that spark your interest, you may need to evaluate if you’d actually like to work for the company in question.

Who am I?

Sam Perozek — Sun, 11 Sep 2022 19:50:09 +0000

Hey everyone! I’m Sam, and I’m making a career pivot at 31. Am I crazy? Sometimes I certainly think so, but when is there going to be a better time to do it? I just sold a business, moved across the country, have an energetic little toddler with another one due in December. The timing is never going to be perfect, right?

My background is in mechanical engineering - I’ve spent the majority of my previous career in the Oil & Gas field focusing on pipeline design and project management. I’ve had some incredible opportunities over the years – fresh out of college, I found myself in SE Louisiana managing a job that was so remote, the only overnight accommodations were houseboats at the local marina. I ate shrimp right off the boat and shot pool with the contractors that had traveled in from Texas. My indoctrination into Cajun culture happened fast. I loved it. Despite the heat and humidity, the hospitality, food and familyesque feeling was intoxicating.

I spent the next 5 years in Louisiana, where I eventually met my fiancé. We got married in New Orleans, and ended up moving up to Utah for a few years. After having our son, we decided it was time to move closer to at least one of our families, so we ending up relocating back to Louisiana. We had an incredible time in Utah, and will cherish the memories made there.

But back to my career pivot – why am I making the move? What’s the motivation?

The pandemic affected everyone differently. My wife and I started our first business in October of 2019, several months prior to the global pandemic settling in. It was extremely tough. We were starting a business in a location that we had no ties to, no network to leverage. I had the opportunity to tackle everything from marketing, sales, HR, operations, etc. – all during a global pandemic. I was involved in a local entrepreneurial group, and we used to joke that the best part of owning your own business was that you got to CHOOSE which 80 hours of the week that you wanted to work. In hindsight, 80 may have been an understatement during those times.

It was an extremely challenging endeavor, but my wife and I are grateful for all the valuable lessons learned through hardship along the way.

The pandemic made me realize that in order to better guarantee income security for our growing family, I needed to adapt my skillset to be able to generate revenue in a remote setting.

That realization was fairly easy – develop a skillset where I can hold a remote career (if needed). I explored whether or not my existing career as a Pipeline Engineer/Project Manager could be pursued in a remote role, and I really struggled to find a solution that offered long-term growth opportunities.

I realized that if I wanted to be able to work remotely, I needed to change paths entirely…..but what would I do?

I researched as many options as I could: starting my own consulting firm, semi-absentee franchise opportunities, etc.

Although I haven’t given up on the entrepreneurial dream, I decided that starting another business wasn’t the best idea at this stage of life – I needed to be able to provide a steady income for my family.

I spent some time to more deeply reflect on my interests and what I found fulfilment through. I originally got into engineering because I love solving problems. I love the rush of adrenaline when you finally “crack the code” to the problem that you’ve been working on for hours, days, or even weeks. To me, there’s nothing like it.

This is how I stumbled on coding. Its very essence requires that you are solving a problem with every keystroke. I started to teach myself Python, and loved it.

Before long, I found myself enrolled in Flatiron school on their software engineering tract. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the experience so far, and I find myself excited to get my hands dirty in some code every day.

Although I hit the pillow most evenings with my brain fried from the overload of new concepts I’m trying to digest, it’s such a refreshing feeling to be excited about learning again. The hardest part right now is pacing myself so that I don’t stress over the literal ocean of material that I have yet to conquer. I can’t wait to get into this field and grow as a developer.

Coding Bootcamp - Was it Worth It?

Sam Perozek — Sun, 11 Sep 2022 19:47:40 +0000

Yes.

Why? I learned how to learn, and I was surprised by how long it took me to nail down the process. It’s been almost 10 years since I’ve been in a formal academic setting, and even then I did most of my learning through my homework. Bootcamp didn’t necessarily have “homework” that I could rely on, so I had to totally reconstruct my learning process, but for the better.

When I first started bootcamp, there were TONS of resources thrown at me for reference. We had live lectures, technical reading, recorded lectures and endless labs (exercises based on the reading material). I initially tried to check everything off in chronological order, but quickly fell behind because there was literally more content available than was possible to review in the allotted timeframe. I’m talking about 100+ hours of video/reading to get through in 5 days. Literally impossible.

One week in and I felt significantly behind (because I was). I knew that I had to change my approach if I wanted to stay afloat. I would get an hour into a video only to realize that I had been daydreaming for the last 20 mins….not exactly productive.

I found that I was able to consume AND retain more material by reading rather than watching videos. I hit the books hard every day to prepare for lecture and it paid off immediately. I was able to get through the material and practice problems before lecture, which let me get the most out of the live sessions.

The biggest lesson for me through all of this was that I need to make sure that I am consistently evaluating my own processes for maximizing productivity. Just because I’ve been doing something the same way for a long time doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s the best way.

It felt borderline ridiculous to be googling “Productivity Tips” or “Influencer Workflows”, but I’ll be damned if I didn’t pick up on some great tips and applications that have had a large influence in maximizing my daily productivity.

I’m grateful for the overall experience and I look forward to applying this to new facets of my life!

React.StrictMode

Sam Perozek — Sun, 17 Jul 2022 16:24:31 +0000

First, a little background on me. I am a mechanical engineer who has spent the last 8+ years in oil & gas. As my career "matured", I spent the majority of my time as a project manager. Over the past few years, I've struggled with the monotony that comes with project management - I rarely had the opportunity to deeply explore any aspect of my projects without the risk of sacrificing my administrative duties on another facet. I became frustrated with the lack of academic enrichment and decided to make a career pivot by enrolling in FlatIron School to pursue a career in Software Engineering.

I intend to use this blog as a medium to explore topics that I found interesting as a beginner. My hope is that other beginners will find my explanations useful, but even if another soul never reads these posts, it's still a beneficial learning exercise for me to compile the information.

So let's begin!

react.StrictMode

What is StrictMode? When should I use it? We'll dive into that eventually, but let's imagine this situation.....you've just been asked to create your first React App. You head over to your terminal, and punch in: npx create-react-app

You wait a few seconds, cd into your new directory, then run npm start. The beautiful image of a spinning atom appears and you pull up your code. In your index.js, you notice that create-react-app has taken the liberty of wrapping your App in StrictMode:

React.StrictMode
App
React.StrictMode

Why? What does it do? You decide to explore a little bit and drop a console.log in your App.....it appears twice. Why? You only logged it once.....why is your App code appearing to execute twice?

StrictMode is a tool that can be used to highlight potential issues in your code. It activates additional checks and warnings that are useful for future-proofing your code for newer versions of React. More specifically, StrictMode helps with:

Identifying components with unsafe lifecycles
Warning about legacy string ref API usage
Warning about deprecated findDOMNode usage
Detecting unexpected side effects
Detecting legacy context API
Ensuring reusable state

This is all great, but why is my code executing twice?

Answer: StrictMode renders components twice to detect any problems or warnings with your code; HOWEVER, THIS ONLY HAPPENS ON DEV AND DOES NOT AFFECT PRODUCTION.

Whew, what a relief! No need to frantically search through your code wondering why it's rendering twice (like I did). It's the normal process that StrictMode uses to evaluate the code and will have no impact on performance once deployed for production.

Feel free to utilize StrictMode for all of the good habits that it reinforces without the worry about production performance!

If the double rendering causes you anxiety, you can easily disable it by removing the tags around the App (or anything else that you've added it to).

Happy coding!