It show it is the tech.

Please call every time up your host Attack Lead the tech lead.

Now, I wanted to talk today about how I got into Google as a software engineer.

Why don't we go in the drive?

Well, actually, I'm a little tired so we can do this here.

Now.

I got to know that it was really quite a journey and it took me 10 years over 10 years off applying to Google, you know, every single year since 2006 through 2014 when I finally got into Google, I have been a plane every single year and you can see their email logs or the recruiters just talking to me, asking me about questions.

And I remember in the final interview where I finally landed the job, the interviewer could see the huge history of my applications that he would just say, while you must seem like you really wanted to get into Google and I'd say, Yeah, that's right, really wanted to get in.

And, you know, I think that's the funny thing is that a lot of people I see junior engineers.

They may get into Google and they would quit within a few months.

You know, they're very entire, though they're very spoiled.

They got the easy.

And these days also hear about people who aren't giving as much respect as they should be to Google engineers or ex Google Tak leads like myself.

You know, people would just say that it's not that great.

It's not that cool.

Anybody can get in, they've lowered their hiring bar.

You're just another tech worker with Asperger's.

You're stealing our jobs.

You're not so cool.

You're not that smart, right?

Oh, maybe you're smart, but you can't communicate.

You don't have empathy.

And there's been a lot of criticism overall for tech workers, even friends and family members.

They would just say things like, Well, yeah, maybe you got into that company, but I would never want to work for a company like that.

You're a sellout.

But for me, it was a gruelling 10 years of work to get into the company, and I never took that for granted.

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One reason that I got into the company was that I applied every single year, and I was very persistent about this.

You know, I know some people, though, only apply once and they fail the interview and then they think, Yeah, forget it, Right?

They did the one that worked there anyway.

They were good, They're fine and they kind of take it as criticism upon themselves and they don't want to deal with that criticism.

They can't take it.

They don't want to feel like a loser and they just give up or they just become content with their jobs, and they somehow managed to convince themselves that they don't want to apply for that.

But for me, I would just make it a game for myself where I would say OK, is that time of year where I'm just going to go try and play to Google.

I just do it once a year every year and give it a go and Even then, I can tell you that I made a lot of mistakes along the way, and I have a few tips for your diabetes can help speed up your process.

But really, the first step is to remain persistent, You know, sometimes is not necessarily your fault.

Sometimes it could just be that there's no openings.

Maybe when you're they need somebody with your skills may be the next year.

They don't just be persistent and keep that going.

The second tip I have for you is to carefully navigate your career.

So for me, when I first got out of college, I was really into game programming.

But little did I know that that is an area of computer science that is quite perpendicular to Silicon Valley Tech, right?

The prestigious tech companies, up until recently with the V are they really didn't have much business doing computer graphics.

They're really more focused on Web and mobile development, and these were areas that I had no experience in because they didn't seem very fun.

They didn't seem very interesting and I only wanted to do game programming, and once they have, you know, here is that the game program industry is notoriously competitive and treats employees poorly.

They'll make tech programmers work very long, hard hours for low pay, low benefits, and they're just cycle through and burn out a bunch of junior engineers.

And that's fine.

And that's really other looking for.

And this may even apply to technologies, right?

Like if you were really focused on, say, Microsoft technology like dot net stack A S P, silver light, all of that stuff, then it may lock you into that specific segment of technology, and then your chances of getting into a company like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Netflix.

You know, those companies are generally on a non Microsoft text back, so that can also lock you in.

And, you know, there may be situations where you may be started to use very proprietary do strange technology's strange languages.

You get into a company and they want you to become a professional ruby on rails developer, and that could get you locked into, say, the ruby on rails stack.

So what you need to do here is to carefully navigate your career, and this is a very key piece of information and the vice years to make sure that whatever technology you're learning or working on, whatever you're developing proficiency in that it can also help you land your next job, right.

It can get you to your next place.

You know, you never really want to like yourself down such that in one or two years you find out that your expertise is in something completely proprietary.

And then when it comes time for you to switch Rose or to apply to Google, you find that you don't have any valuable skills that the company with one.

So my story is that I was working on Computer Graphics s Sony Pictures over in Los Angeles and Southern California has a lot of these graphics based gaming companies e a.

Rockstar games in the companies like that, and they just cycle through a bunch of interns and college grad students and stuff like that.

So I was doing my stuff there and, you know, it was low pay.

It was fun, and I enjoyed the work, and what happened was I started building some of my own APs, my Web baps, and luckily for me, those Web APS took off, and at that point I had quit my job and just focus on the our Web app.

So it was quite a career shift to go from computer graphics C plus plus Open Geo into Web technologies.

And most of my co workers had no idea what Web technologies would be.

You know, something just fun that people may dabble in here and there.

But that also helped open the path for me to get into companies in Silicon Valley, which are really more Web dominated.

Not the other interesting thing to know here is that these days many of the interview questions that tech companies used to ask are bent because they're just so tricky.

And they're so ridiculous, right?

People would ask questions like, Why are manhole covers round?

How would you climb to the top of Mount Fuji?

How many gas stations air in the United States?

People would ask MP complete problems like the traveling salesman problem.

Just to see how far you could get there would has totally ridiculous questions.

And a lot of these air just band these days.

But when I was going through the interview process, I was being asked a lot about this stuff and the whole thing, just kind of got me jaded and for me, I just decided I didn't wanna waste my time studying any of this stuff.

I didn't see how it would be really relevant.

You know, I just refused to prepare for that.

And not only that, I didn't really believe in preparing.

I thought that if I was a good programmer, that my skill should show for themselves.

And I really believed in going in there and talking about all the projects that have been building.

But unfortunately, a lot of people were not really interested in the projects.

You know, a lot of interviewers are not well trained and they really only want to hear if you can explain why manhole covers around, believe it or not, I was also a little afraid that I would study so much that the interviewer would actually ask me a question that I would already have heard of.

And then I thought, Well, what would I do then?

And I didn't want to try to study too much, because then I would know every single problem.

And then, you know, people would say, Hey, you've heard that problem before.

You must have been studying you know, that's really not the right way to go about this these days.

Actually, I've heard so many of these problems that if I were to go to an interview loop, I would probably have heard, like 30% to 50% the problems already and then the rest would be very relations on some of these problems.

A lot of these air fairly routine things.

And you know, that's one piece of advice for you is to just go through a sight like saline TKO attacker rink and just tried to understand and get as much broad coverage of these problems as you can.

There's really not that many different types of coding problems that people will be throwing at you.

And there's not the all that many different algorithms and the data structures that people are using.

You know, there's a few basic data structures, stacks, queues, hash maps, arrays.

That's pretty much it, you know.

And then it's just how can combine them to do different types of things.

And as for algorithms, people don't do algorithms anymore.

Everyone's just using machine learning, so no one's even asking algorithm questions anymore.

I remember one time I went to a Google interview and they would ask me like Well, what do you want to do here?

And I just thought that was the most ridiculous question.

And so I answered the question by saying, Yeah, I want to just change the world.

I'm here to make a huge impact on the world.

I want just make the world better.

I want to do something huge and improve the world for the better.

That's what I'm here to do.

And, you know, it's like, Well, yeah, and that's true, right?

That's the question.

That's my answer, right?

What else do I want to do?

I want 1,000,000 bucks, right?

Why do I want to work at Google so I can become an ex Google tackle it?

That's why you know people aren't stupid and everybody knows that the interview process is broken and it can be improved.

But there's just not really a good solution, does not really good way to improve it, especially across a huge large organization, and usually the feedback is along the lines of what a candidate really wanted to get into the company.

They would prepare, they would study upon their data structures algorithms.

Times first analysis.

That's the game.

Those are the rules of the game that have been laid out.

And if you wanna win, you're gonna have to play that game.

That's what I had to understand, and I had to begin really taking it seriously and studying for in preparing for it.

Not.

My fourth piece of advice here is to make sure that you're using the right language to write technologies.

So here's what happened to me when I started building my own naps.

I have been using PHP, my sequel, the next part of the lamp stack, and when that was going to Google interviews, I would be using PHP.

And that should be okay, right?

Usually, recruiters were just tell you that you can use any language you like.

Interviewers are going to be language agnostic.

And, you know, even though Google doesn't even use PHP across most of their text back, I could still use PHP, and that would be fine.

And so that's what I did.

And I found that time after time I could not get through the interview process because usually interviewers, they look at that PHP code and they just think it's garbage code.

I remember I would be writing code.

And then the interviewer would have to ask, What is that?

Dollar signs in tax is that Does that mean variable and that have to explain that stuff?

And I could tell that the interviews were just never quite pleased with the coat, and especially if they asked one of these problems, like reverse a link list or something, it would be harder to write in PHP, which doesn't really have pointers.

So for me, my big break came when one time I was out in Japan just traveling around, working on my own stuff, and I decided to get into iPhone development because I had a bunch of websites, games and APS and then wanted to translate those overto iPhone.

And so I picked up Objective C.

And then I remember that year I applied to Google, as I usually did, and I applied for a Web role.

But they told me that since I seem to have some iPhone experience, they wanted to slap me and for a mobile as well.

So I said, Okay, fine, we can try that.

So this time I would do the interview in the mix of languages.

I would use some objective see which I have learned of mix him some standards CNC Plus Plus, I would tend to rely on PHP and JavaScript, which I was more comfortable with.

But then, when it came time to coding, I would actually translate those into, say, pseudo code or C like syntax, such that it would just be more comfortable for the interviewers to look at.

And we wouldn't have to debate about the language syntax at the time.

There is also a huge shortage, and I was engineers, and actually, at that time I remember YouTube was not that popular.

And so they offered me a row in YouTube, Iowa's engineering, which I took up.

But I remember it's funny.

Even then, I was thinking I didn't really want to join the YouTube team.

I thought that the Google team was more prestigious.

It turns out, in the end that YouTube has exploded in growth and the YouTube Iowa Sap has become one of the top APS in the APP store, largely in part thanks to yours truly.

Now the funny thing is, at the time I landed this Google job offer I also landed two other job offers, so I had a total of three offers to pick from, and I just remember a sing all of these interviews at the time.

I remember in the past I would stumble through these technical interviews because I just chose not to prepare for them.

I used strange languages.

I didn't take the process seriously in the past.

I didn't want people to know that I was trying to get into these companies.

I felt it would be too humiliating to myself if I told people that I was trying to interview for this stuff.

If I told them I was serious, if I was actually putting in time and preparation and effort into any of this stuff and then to lose personal time and effort and to not get the job offer would just be too humiliating for myself.