7 min read
Thursday and Friday were long days of chugging through writing a unit test. Supposedly writing tests is supposed to be fun but I find it pretty boring, especially when it starts getting longer than the actual code it's supposed to test.
Still, I was determined to get it finished even though my stomach was growling at 1 pm Friday afternoon. I saw someone messaged the intern chat saying the waffles they were giving out right outside the building were amazing. We had gotten an email saying there was a Wafels and Dinges truck outside that Google Photos had taken out (and decorated with their logos) to drive around Manhattan for a promotional event. One of the interns managed to convince me to pull myself away from the computer for long enough to venture outside.
The truck was right across 8th Ave and there was a line forming of random people and possibly a few Googlers. It's hard to turn down free food and I had a couple people ask me while I waited in line if it was really free.
The campaign was "Pay With a Photo". The reason the line wasn't moving quickly was because at the front there was a game going on. There was a board with a list of categories that it would flip through and whatever it landed on is what you'd have to find a photo of in your photos. The great thing about having Google Photos is that you can search by category, places, and even people. So for example, if you have a ton of photos like I do, you could open up Photos and search for something like "concert", which was one of the categories someone ahead of me got.
It's pretty good at correctly grouping too. Even I'm impressed by this.
It can detect a cat in this picture even though:
1.) you can only see half its head
2.) it's not a real cat
3.) the lighting sucks because this was my crappy dorm room in Brock
Oh and you only had 20 seconds to do so. Tough luck if you had to dig through your camera roll. So if you couldn't produce a photo that fit the category in under 20 seconds, you would get a small waffle or a large one if you could. They video recorded all the participants too. I stepped up in front of the board and camera and was given a brief intro to the game before getting my topic. The board flipped over various categories until halting on "flight". Pfft that's easy, I just took a trip to the other side of the country 2 months ago.
Good thing for the search function because I took a few hundred photos between my trip and now.
So needless to say I easily won my large waffle. You could even order it with everything on it... everything being some kind of caramel-tasting syrup, powdered sugar, and a massive amount of whipped cream. It kicked the crap out of those Ego waffles I used to eat for breakfast long ago.
One delicious (and rather messy) waffle
After eating it on an empty stomach I regretted it. I figured I should grab some real food too and so I went up to Water Tower to get some sushi to go right before they closed. I walked up to the sushi chef since there was no line being so late and asked for some to go, explaining I had a waffle from the truck outside prior. "I swear they're trying to kill you guys", he joked and handed me a plastic container with a mix of both kinds of the daily sushi. I actually ended up saving it for dinner since I didn't get hungry until super late.
After that, I continued working on my unit test, getting progressively more frustrated. My mentor offered to introduce me to a friend who was good at C++ since my unit test was starting to get pretty ugly-looking the more I added to it to increase coverage. Of course I didn't know that meant within the next 15 minutes because I was jump-scared when someone suddenly tapped my arm as I was staring at the terminal impatiently waiting for a build to complete with my headphones in.
He helped a bit but then I had to run off to another mock interview. I was not thrilled by this one. It was a pretty simple problem: implement Conway's "Game of Life". I did this -- with THREADS nonetheless as an EXAM PROBLEM back in my sys prog class last fall WITH WRAPPING. There's no algorithmic thinking involved, just checking of the neighbors of every cell in the grid and setting the cell's value in a new grid to return as the next "generation".
Yet, I couldn't even remember if I was supposed to use length or length() on an array and if it was rows or columns that came first. I seemed to have left my brain elsewhere because all I knew was that I had to check the neighbors without causing an ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException but I couldn't formulate the proper if statements for some reason. The silence stung as I stood there feeling like my thought process was buffering and then ultimately timed out.
I sat down as I got exponentially more stressed out wondering if I was tripping up on such an easy problem (that I've done a much more difficult version of prior) if I would ever manage to pull off a real onsite interview. I was told I was psyching myself out and that I don't have enough confidence -- both which are true. It ended up being 5 minutes of me staring/attempting to spew Java onto the whiteboard and 30 minutes of a lecture while I stared at a wall, trying to keep it together.
For the rest of the day I was pretty distraught and stared at a corner in my office after getting back for a solid 15 minutes. All I could think was that there was no way that I'd be able to pull my interviews off-- not without having done any actual coding in my native language all summer, unlike other conversion candidates, and not with my almost nonexistent confidence that is actually incredibly difficult to remedy being surrounded by intimidatingly smart people.
I was offered to play frisbee around dinnertime but I was in a rotten mood and kept on working as the others packed up their stuff and went home for the weekend. I figured if I got something done that day I'd feel slightly better about myself. I don't even remember what time it was went my mentor came by with a root beer and to invite me over for sushi and videogames since I was in a horrible mood. I declined and continued working, not feeling up for two of my favorite things in life.
I ended up getting several CLs sent out and approved and a couple bugs filed and fixed between Friday night and Saturday night, which helped me feel a little better. What made me angry was waking up on Saturday and almost instantly having the solution to the interview problem pop into my mind as if my brain decided to come back from its break.
I'm worried the same thing is going to happen for the real thing with obviously more severe consequences, which is making me weigh the options of preventing soul-crushing failure by avoiding the process altogether or putting it all on the line for a shot at working at a phenomenal company. At this point, I no longer know which will be the least painful of the two decisions.