5 min read
I didn't exactly get a whole lot of sleep after a roach infiltrated my room at some point last night. I was minding my own business studying as I saw something out of the corner of my eye scuttle across one of my dressers. The roach crawled into the crack between the two dressers before I could kill it and I couldn't find it after moving them. Needless to say, I didn't sleep until I found it again and made sure it was good and dead... which ended up being around 6 am.
Only thing is I forgot to clean up the guts after I killed it since I was so tired. It was only after I got to work and read my texts (since I texted the apartment owner about the roach after seeing it) that throwing out the carcass isn't enough, it needs to be flushed and the space disinfected because the smell of a dead roach attracts its buddies...
*cue those violin shrieks from Psycho*
Besides that little nightmare, I had yet another mock interview today with my host and yesterday with another Googler I didn't know. The one yesterday kind of was another train wreck. It was a conceptually simple problem but for some reason as with the Game of Life question, I was drawing a blank. One thing I sometimes forget to do is use metacognition to put code onto the board, which is critical to succeeding at technical interviews IMO.
It ended up being 45 minutes of me rambling about whatever I thought and then staring at the board trying to figure out the proper way to handle the edge cases. Then I kept tripping over myself as I threw vague variable names onto the board instead of using very long names that actually described the variable properly. I left feeling almost as horrible as after the last train wreck mock interview.
"STOP DWELLING ON IT AND GET BACK TO WORK"
(Also a pretty accurate depiction of me coding on any given day)
At the end of yesterday I asked the other interns who already did interviews how difficult they were since I felt like I was now wasting my own time and my mock interviewers' time. Like I've heard from my mentor, there's supposedly nothing to lose from doing them anyway although I'd argue that I've already lost a ridiculous number of hours studying when I could have been sleeping or watching movies.
Today when we had kind of a final lunch with the interns who were heading out for the summer, I was told apparently all I need to know is big O, data structure methods, and basic syntax for Java and I should be fine. They do say a bit of luck is involved though, which is unnerving.
It later occurred to me that I probably wasn't doing that great since I keep scheduling them for mid afternoon when I'm at my most sluggish. I also haven't been sleeping well and I'm still getting over the cold too. I remember only now for some reason that one bit of advice from my mentor that I kind of overlooked was that I'm not doing well because of what I'm doing, I'm doing well in spite of what I'm doing.
I decided for today's mock interview to try my hardest not to panic and instead got mocha right beforehand since I was starting to feel my thought process slowing down. I quickly chugged it and went to the conference room and anxiously waited for the question.
It was actually conceptually simple, but had hidden edge cases. After quickly coming up with a smart solution by implementing my own comparator (this was some crazy 3D array stuff I was dealing with), I happened to miss the edge case, which took me a while to figure out, especially with 3 indices to worry about. I actually did manage to get the whole solution on the board in time though.
Either the coffee or the placebo effect helped me with this one since I'd say it was no harder or easier than yesterday's problem. I'm going to test this theory on my last mock interview on Tuesday. This week alone I've done 4 mock interviews and 6.5 overall.
I'm guessing these indicate increasing levels of espresso from left to right. So the red swirl is caffeine overload? (Apparently it's manual)
I'm also going to try combining this with getting enough sleep now that I'm pretty much done with my project and documentation. I only have one last crucial CL, which is already out for review after I whipped up a few hundred lines of Go yesterday with a decent unit test to go with it.
Between getting a massage to spend some more of my massage points before leaving for the summer, not doing terribly on the mock interview, and mentally relinquishing the project I felt better than I have all week.
Then actually examining the failure case for conversion doesn't seem as terrible as I thought. I'd more likely than not get at least one follow-up internship for next summer and get to pursue a masters instead. Maybe I could study AI at Stanford or something and then go work on moonshots at Google[x] helping program the craziest and coolest software the world has ever seen. That idea's a moonshot in itself though.
I actually managed to leave the office at twilight and everything seemed to look and smell not so bad. Hopefully if I can keep this up for a week, I'll have the option of what to do with my future be it grad school or starting my new life at a tech giant after graduation.