Tech, the only oil that is crude yet can be mined and refined on a computer or any other device. Just like every other student in the Nigerian public university system; education has succeeded in becoming a side-hustle and the fruits of wealth, independence and social elevation a successful career in tech bestows upon one obsesses any Nigerian student involved in technology daily.
My mentor who shared this story with me was a graduate of Electronic and Electrical Engineering from a reputable university in Nigeria.
Unlike in the olden days of bagging one's CV around and applying for employment opportunities physically in firms, the processes involved in a job application are as simple as click and submit. During his undergraduate days, he spent most of his time concentrating on what he termed "the essential" and dedicated lesser time to what he called "the orthodox". According to him, he's learned so many frameworks that he'd literally become a framework himself and before he graduated; he'd started processing companies that thirst for his skillset. The application process was seamless for him as he had a reservoir of projects that even if the world withdraws from it, it'll never go bankrupt.
He applied for a job at Toptal. There were three stages to be passed. The first stage was more like a language proficiency test and he performed excellently well. The second stage required them to have an interactive session with their recruiters and he was very much happy to have scaled through it to the third and final stage. At the third and final stage, he was given a binary tree and was asked to perform an inorder traversal of the tree. In fact, the employer gave him the volition to google the code; but he must be able to explain the flow of the code. At the junction, he crashed out of the interview, he could neither explain the code nor understand the concept of traversing a binary tree.
His experience taught me four golden lessons:
A Programming language is just a tool, the concepts that the language helps the computer to break down are worthy of being cherished more than the lofty syntaxes the language offers. You can spend years building a bank of projects, however, in the quest of doing that, do you really understand the concepts that make the frames work? Do you take your time to query your knowledge or you're volume-oriented?
The cliche that education is weak and isn't synonymous with success should be debunked. I can't pardon a Tech student who makes such a statement. My mentor told me that the binary tree that sounded alien had actually been taught to them at school during one of the "orthodox(unessential)" lectures. In the same way, a good number of students don't look beyond what the times preach, they try to follow the trend without realizing that there's more than one way up. Kindly take both your education and skillset serious, both are fundamental to your success.
Always put on your camera peradventure your interview is remote. My mentor told me that one of the reasons he was also rejected was because he didn't put on his camera throughout the interactive session of the interview. Recruiters want to know you, they want to confirm whether or not you're emotionally and physically fit for the role for which you're applying.
Take your time to review other Developers' codes, and explore the open source world. Don't just copy and paste!!! You might be hired to complete someone else's project or explain what a line of code does, would you like to agonize over a rejection that's stemmed from your inability to do justice to a line of code?
The interview process isn't as scary as the tech world preaches it. It's a process to test your learning curve and examine your competence for that which you proclaim to be capable of. Programming is beyond the language, it's beyond your skilful use of the frameworks, it's deeply rooted in your ability to think and connect your brain to your fingers.
Your comments and reviews are highly welcome, I hope this piece gives you the confidence and right frame of mind to have a breakthrough in your programming quest!!! Thanks for reading. Arigato!!!