Miles to Go

Miles to Go

4 min read

Finally I actually managed to go to sleep at a reasonable hour last night -- somewhere around 10 pm. Unfortunately this meant I woke up at 4 and couldn't go back to sleep. I couldn't stop wondering whether I'd finally feel like I should be working here if I managed to get hired full-time (Another Googler on the other side of the world told me today the Impostor Syndrome only gets worse).

I got up around 10 as usual and got ready for work. Only today as I was walking down the hallway to go to bathroom I was greeted by the resident cat who either wasn't happy because it was roasting in the apartment or because she was lonely. She wouldn't let me walk away without meowing and grabbing onto my legs to get me to stop so I would pay attention to her. I made sure there was enough water in the bowl since it was hot and eventually after 5 minutes I was able to get away to finish getting ready.

I got in around 11 as usual and got the daily smoothie from 5BB (although it should technically be called the weekly smoothie since it's the same flavor all week). It wasn't the color I was expecting.

Mmmm... the health benefits

I was expecting something along the lines of orange/yellow/pink since that's usually the normal color. It's the daily drink that's usually green. I think I may have gotten the daily drink on accident since it didn't seem to have the regular smoothie consistency but it was still good. And no, it didn't taste like grass or celery.

I didn't feel terribly productive since I was in a couple meetings before and after lunch, and I kept monitoring the status of a I made on , which somehow ended up on the popular page after only 2 hours, which is pretty impressive when it's not pertinent to the current internal buzz. Obviously I'm not posting it here, but that was kind of the major distraction of the day. Thankfully I was productive over the weekend so I didn't feel guilty.

However, I did manage to get another 3 chunks of code submitted, thanks to the majority of the work being already done from the weekend. Also, my mentor helped convince me to actually get going with prepping for conversion by having me set a goal to do 2-3 Cracking the Coding Interview problems on pen and paper by Wednesday. He's actually trained to be do interviews so we're going to do at least one mock interview. This should be less nerve-wracking than my very first Google mock interview back in October since it's not a random Googler but unfortunately that's not how the real ones are going to be.

Unlike last time, I'm going to need to do all practice by hand, not by typing into a Google doc. It made sense for internship prep since the technical interviews took place in a Google doc but this time they're in-person and on-site, so I'd better be prepared to actually write.

I think last time was easy since typing is a lot faster than writing, saving valuable time and I was able to interview from the comfort of my own house. Being on the phone is great too because the interviewer can't see the insane expressions you're making to keep from verbally freaking out (No, it's not done via Google Hangouts like in The Internship).

Actually trying out a couple problems at the end of the day, I was kind of frustrated. It seems I'm a bit rusty on Java after not having written a single line of it since the week before I left for NYC and I'm pretty rusty on algorithmic thinking after not having done any kind of intense prep since October/November. 

Writing what I think is a good algorithm on paper and then looking at the actual solution

Since I'm using Go and C++ at the same time, I'll sometimes start writing Go in my C++ code and C++ in my Go code. Thankfully writing on paper though is naturally Java for me since it's actually the only language I've ever coded in by hand (except for that one Google mock interview which I stupidly attempted in C and filled the entire whiteboard when supposedly 1 line of Python could have solved it). Needless to say it's going to take a lot more prep to get to a point that I even feel remotely capable of pulling off two real successful interviews.

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