It's a sunday evening, I have roughly an hour before I want to head to bed, and I'm bored. A bunch of things have happened since my last post, so it's time for a life update.

Finding Work

After slacking off for a few months at my parents' place, I finally started to look for a job at the beginning of this year. And I have to admit: looking for a programming job with a computer science degree really makes this ridiculously easy. My plan was as follows:

• Create a CV and include some projects of mine / during uni to cover a variety of topics
• Create (yet another) website for more details and video demos of my projects
• Once I have these ready, start a first wave of applications using just that CV document
• If that fails to work, do more waves but put an increasing amount of effort into my applications:
  • Professional picture
  • Cover letter
  • Company tailored CV

Interestingly enough, the first round of just sending out my CV was already enough to land me a job I'm interested in - against my own expectations.

Interview Process

It was really interesting to see the different interview processes. All first-round-interviews were online, while some companies requested an in-person meeting for a second round, which made the whole process easier to manage.

For the most part, is was an interesting opportunity to find out what kind of stuff I'm interested in (short-term or long-term projects? Team sizes? Company structure? Actual projects? Company benefits / opportunities?). It's probably not representative to actually trying these things out, but I feel like my second round of interviews would have been more targetted towards my (current) interests. I was hella nervous at each interview, and that probably won't change in the future.

Most companies just did "vibe checks" and wanted me to talk about my projects, interests, and my university experience. The company I ended up with used this strategy as well. I think that this approach, depending on the projects you can show off, makes the most sense. Given that the source code of my stuff was not available [0], I kind of expected some technical questions about my projects, but that didn't really happen. Some companies asked me about my prior experience in certain fields (Have you ever did "x" / Have you worked with "y" before?), but we the conversations were pretty chill in that regard.

Interviewing for a C++ developer position, one company asked me to explain various C++ aspects for an hour:

• Tell me about the C++ history [1]. What interesting stuff happened in the last 10 years?
• What are data structures / mechanism used in multi-threaded applications?
• Tell me about access qualifiers (public, private, protected)
• What does const do?
• What does mutable do?
• What are lambdas? What do you use them for?
• Tell me about the different kind of constructors.
• What is the difference between Smart Pointers and garbage collected language like Java? How do these differences manifest in practice?
• Tell me about TCP / UDP
• How many bits are in an IPv4 address? How many in IPv6?
• What is a subnet-mask? How do you use them?

After each answer of mine, I got a short explanation from the interviewer as well. While I think I got the majority right, there where a lot of aspects I was shaky on / unsure off. I tried to keep my bullshitting to a minimum, so I think I was pretty straight forward when I was unsure of things or straight up never heard of stuff (e.g. mutable in C++, that was a TIL). While I got a stuff wrong, they asked me back for a second round, but I declined (not due to the interview process).

Another company pre-screened me with three very basic C questions:

• What does static do?
• What does volatile do?
• What is the difference between UDP and TCP?

I think that's pretty fair, but their second round was brutal:

• they gave me an 8 hour (unpaid) homework assignment, for which I had a week to complete
• then I presented my approach + solution in a presentation,
• after which we had a discussion / Q&A about my stuff with the team

While I did all of these things, I felt pretty mixed about the process and I'm not sure I'd do that again. It also didn't help that I got a rejection [2] afterwards, which made the whole thing feel like a waste of time.

No company told me a salary up front; instead they all asked for my expectations, to which I gave a range of 55k€ - 58k€ / year (germany). Given that I didn't have a full-time job like that before, I also explicitly said that I don't know what's realistic and that I might adjust accordingly given the offers I receive, to which most responded with a gist of "I cannot guarantee that right now, but it's not unrealistic".

The company I ended up with

• had a really sparse job description,
• was the only company offering full-remote work, which was the only reason why I decided to sent them my CV in the first place,
• actually offered my a salary within my salary expectation, even though I intentionally left myself room for negotiations [3].

The Job

It's been three weeks, but I'm still in the introductory phase, meaning I'm still being introduced to projects, to my coworkers, to the parts my coworkers are working on, what the plans for each project are, what the workflow (for both programming and actually using the software) looks like, etc etc.

The actual amount of programming that I contributed to the projects is pretty sparse at best, but I think that somewhat normal. Right now I feel like a digital cleaner: I'm kind of doing annoying work like moving modules around, fixing up fucky or straight up missing build processes, and so on. This is frustrating at times (as linker errors always tend to be, Visual Studio straight up doesn't help at all here though), but it's also rewarding, because this is work I'd consider useful - if only to the project itself, but still useful. That usefulness is something I was lacking during my university studies, so I'm actually really motivated.

I had some days were I couldn't / shouldn't really do anything: Everyone has their set of tasks assigned to them, meaning if I'm waiting for something or someone else to come back to me for all projects, there's nothing for me to do. It's a really weird feeling - especially after getting my first paycheck (which isn't even "a full one" because I started work in the middle of the month). Stuff like that, seeing how high the invoices given to clients are, the scope and amount of people on each project - it's a really weird alienating feeling seeing how much money is involved in all of these things.

Looking at the code, I feel like you can't really escape OOP, and I mean that in a bad way. The amount of additional complexity being introduced to projects / problems is insane. Want to read in a file? I'd have written a function, but the code I'm reading is a hierarchy of inheritence with specialized classes for each type of object being read. I know I've got a sample size of n=1, but I'm starting to believe a salary is dependent on the management of complexity for a problem which shouldn't even exist. Yet somehow this house of card doesn't seem want to seem to fall. It's fascinating.

Personal Life

I'm still at my parents' place for the time being. I can't really complain:

• They are very chill,
• I've got a feeling of safety during my job probabtion period, and
• the amount of money I can save is insane.

Due to remote work, I still kind of have to figure out where I want to live although I'm (at least for now) very flexible obviously. The flexible working hours have given me some structure in life, in the best way possible: 8 hours a day force me to stop slacking off so much, but I still have the freedom of putting in the hours when I want to (given that I'm available for meetings, but they are at pretty reasonable times).

I am realizing how valuable time has suddenly become (for me). There's pretty little time left in the day after work. Hell, I even wrote this post over several days because I wanted to keep my schedule in tact. Right now I'm working overtime in order to build up a nice cushion of a few work hours - just in case, as long as I'm still highly motivated for work. I'll probably tone this down sometime soon though. I already know that I don't want to work 8 hours a day (like this) for the rest of my "career" (if possible).

This post is a bit rambly and unguided, which I think kind of fits into my whole situation. It still feels surreal that I actually entered this next chapter of my life. It's just a job, but still :)