Comeback

Reminiscing

Woke up yesterday in the morning and smoked a bit with my guitarist on the porch.I opened with "I tried to get us to California before my money ran out, and I thought I got pretty damn close… But I'm still working on it." I knew I had a job lead in San Diego I was pursuing and they were looking for an embedded developer to work with smart home systems.

Its funny how life works sometimes. Half a year ago was the first time I tried to get to the Golden State but unfortunately that attempt did not really go as planned. The company I interviewed for back then was also north of San Diego and similarly wanted me to make a test project for them to prove my competency. The test project took me around 3 months to make as I had to learn their rendering engine and systems from scratch to try to implement something custom over it. Once I submitted the project I went onsite where I completely flopped my final exam! After all, the people interviewing me were all computer graphics guys making photorealistic graphics for huge companies like Microsoft, Activision, and other AAA studios. I thought I knew a thing or two about writing game engines but here I was completely out of place since these programmers knew so much about operating systems, low-level GPU architecture, and the math's behind making scenes that appear realistic and lifelike. If I could compare it to a game this experience there felt like playing chess against Magnus Carlson.

The second time I tried to get to California was a few weeks ago and even though I failed, I sure gave those doctors and scientists a run for their money! [read the story here]. Almost everyone at that company had a Masters or PhD as they developed FDA Class III medical implants and robotic prosthetics to treat patients with underrepresented diseases. Even though I absolutely crushed that interview and even got taken out to lunch after, this was a Senior role and I was competing with some of the brightest Harvard and MIT graduates being flown in from all across the country. If this was a videogame it felt like a game of Dark Souls were you actually defeat the final boss, but even that does not always guarantee victory in real life.

Now I'm on my third try to get to California and if I get this right I might be going back to San Diego! If San Francisco is the city with the biggest tech influence and LA has the biggest music scene, what I like about San Diego is that it has the kindest people.The odds are definitely stacked against me but I've been at this for quite a while, so I know I will get there. Eventually…

After all they say that the third times the charm.

Galactic Ambassador

I got an email from a kid this morning who used to live across the street from my mom a few years back. I remember first moving into my apartment when I was his age and I believe that’s the last time I saw him. Next thing you know, 3 years later, he randomly shows up to my doorstep at 10pm on a Tuesday, handing me a 20 dollar bill and asking to stay the night!

He's showed up a couple more random times since then and I ended up nicknaming him the "Galactic Ambassador" because of how random the visits are. The last time he did it was earlier this week when I see him walking down the street with a box of donuts. I tried telling the kid that I dont want his parents hitting me up again that its not normal to randomly show up to someone's house and atleast to give me a heads up to which he replied "Im sorry I come uninvited, but I brought donughts. Is it okay?"

This was the day after I got a rejection letter from the medical research company I interviewed for and I was walking to the pizza place down the street to start doing deliveries. As we walked together the Galactic Ambassador asked if it was okay to walk balk to the crib and hang out with my roommate asking "Is it permissive?" I laughed a bit and told him it was okay. I had a longer shift then I expected that day and was not prepared to start work immediately since I thought I had orientation first. My phone kept dying so I had to deliver pizzas without GPS and try to figure things out by memory.

New Opportunity

I got a notification for a call for Walmart in Sunnyvale California. Turned out just to be another Indian recruiter, I hate when they call and are impossible to understand! My best shot is the San Diego company right now and even that seems highly unlikely to be fruitful. I have to write a test project for them to simulate an alarm system with different events, rooms, and properties to keep track of and display to the user.

I often talk about how there are different types of intelligence out there, like street smarts versus book smarts and etc. When I've tried to make it out to Cali in the past I was dealing with some of the smartest people in the country, advanced computer graphics guys the first time around, with doctors and scientists the most recent time. What is so daunting about this new position is that the guys testing me write some of the best code I've ever seen. I don’t know if I stand a chance against their skillset and his level of knowledge when it comes to using clean architecture, and writing good code with documentation.

Since I'm so used to making gamified apps, I decided to do a creative twist on this project as well. I ended up making a simulation where you are a commander in charge of your bunker. When I've made test projects in the past it always ended up being some kind of game; I did it recently with "Shrodinginers Cats" using MAUI with C# at the medical research company and a basketball game the first time around visiting San Diego with those advanced graphics guys. I thought I did pretty well on both those tries, but the standards are so high in this new position I'm not sure I have a shot. Like I mentioned, they write some of the nicest code I have ever seen.

The requirements include proper error handling, running tests, and using the "flow" pattern which I'm not sure I can get down properly. One of the requirements is to capture when the network goes out and I included something funny in that scenario: I display "Evacuate Commander" at the top of the app bar and give the user the option to abort the mission by force crashing the app using zero division!

If they have a sense of humor then I'm sure that will increase my chances. I told them I would have a submission ready by tomorrow so lets see how this goes…

The White Rabbit

I found myself revisiting the same conversation I had with my guitarist a couple weeks back, when we were talking about chasing the white rabbit and how it comes around when you give up or when you least expect it. One of the songs he wrote has lyrics that go "creatures of habit chase the white rabbit" and I pointed out that the phrase actually has double meaning. When I was finally ready to give up the last time around literally an hour later I got the email I was being flown out for an interview, but now it was time to get deeper into the rabbit hole.

Everyone in life is chasing the white rabbit, whether it’s the dream job, the dream girl, or just about any ambitious goal you can think of. Its all a competition. Its all about wealth and status. The last time I was in California I was competing against some of the smartest people invited from all across the country, lots of them had advanced degrees and many more years of experience. The point is I'm not the only one who wanted that opportunity, and even the greatest intelligence and charisma cannot always win. Sometimes the system wins, whether it’s the government or the colleges and universities.

I spent a couple days working on a test project for the opportunity in San Diego. The engineers there write some of the greatest code I have seen and I highly doubt I'd be able to compete with them. I made a cool little minigame for them, and my alarm system simulation turned into a minigame where you are a commander monitoring the activity in their bunker. It seems farfetched but its what I usually do. I made a test game project for the medical research company using the MAUI framework and I made a test project half a year ago for the advanced graphics guys, even though it took me months to complete and I could barely answer a question during the final interview!

But writing test projects has been what's got my foot in the door. Its how I landed my first tech job, which was also a medical company. Even though these engineers in San Diego write some of the nicest code I've ever seen maybe my submission will impress them enough where I can get another shot at my mission.

The important thing is to remember not to chase the white rabbit because that’s how you lose. When you chase it runs away, and I learned that the hard route. In order to succeed you need to become the one that’s in demand, not them. Become the white rabbit. I need to be able to act like I'm in a state of abundance, flip the script, and be smarter this time around, even if it means changing my story… At least for the sake of another interview

Brainstorming

I submitted my minigame project to the company in San Diego 2 days ago, still haven't heard back but trying not to think too much on it. I expect the results to be either good or really bad but its difficult to say at this point. I was forced to write some of the cleanest code and architecture to adhere to their professional standards, and even if I'm not sure its good enough they may appreciate the final product and funny twist I added.

Its strange because this morning I got calls from 5 different recruiters out of the blue, with the best lead also being a company in the LA area! I feel like even if one opportunity doesn’t work out I still have to keep a positive outlook on life and not put all my eggs in one basket. I was so convinced I got the last job in California the stress and wait that followed was pretty intense. I should have just kept grinding. The day after I got the email that I wasn’t selected was the day I started doing delivery at the pizza place down the street.

The Galactic Ambassador payed us another visit yesterday and we ended up hanging with him for a few hours. I made plans in the evening with a friend to go to a comedy event. I tried to bring my guitarist but I felt like he was too exhausted after the earlier visit! I wasn’t sure what I was walking into that evening and I got the impression it was an open mic, but it just ended up being 2 people doing a comedy set. It was okay and I'm glad the crowd liked it but it wasn't my cup of tea. The main act was this chick who was a little too much and too oversexualized, at one point she flashed the audience wearing pepperoni as pasties. I feel like when women reveal too much it can definitely be a turnoff, that’s why even the playboy pictures in my house still look classy.

Less is more sometimes, especially with women. You can put all this emotion and all this investment into one person or one opportunity and it will all be for nothing sometimes. You just have to keep growing a better garden and another white rabbit will come along. Whether it’s the dream job or the dream girl the analogy still applies and you need to work on yourself. You need to attract instead of chasing.

Million Dollar Question

Had my third round call for that position at the smart home company in San Diego today. Its been a week since I submitted my test project for them and the fact that I've made it this far is already a good sign. We touched on a few technical subjects during our talks but the most daunting question he asked me was a test to my aptitude and thought process rather than my skillset.

The question was "how much do you think Americans spent on gasoline in 2024?" It threw me off guard a bit and I started with a wild guess, but he told me to think on it a bit… It was difficult for me to come up with an answer so I asked him to give me some context to which he replied "lets just assume 2024 is an average year for fuel consumption." So I kept thinking on it a bit.

I started think out loud saying that the population of the USA is about 300 million people and to find out an answer Id have to think about how many active cars are on the road and how much gasoline they consume. I approximated that I might need 5 gallons to fill my car which usually lasts me 2 days, which I rounded down to 2.5 gallons per day. Then I assumed that half the population of the country is driving daily consuming that amount of fuel which gives us about 400 million gallons of gas per day. Multiply that number by 365 and you get the total the US consumes per year on gas. So to summarize, 2.5 times 365 by 150 million should give you the answer

Ready for the craziest part? As I'm writing this out I did the calculation which comes out to 136,876,000. If you did a Google search for "how much do you think Americans spent on gasoline in 2024" you get 137 billion gallons of gas, so I was right on the mark! I should name this equation "people to gas ratio." Its insane to think I could get the right answer since this was supposed to be the type of question that’s impossible to answer.

Closing Remarks

There goes my 3rd attempt to get us out of the state. I'd count it as such because I passed 3 rounds perfectly and it still didn’t go any further than that: the first round involved creating a UML diagram, the second one was a coding challenge, and the 3rd round was where I answered the million dollar question. Still didn’t get lucky, but that doesn’t mean I'm ever giving up!

It got me thinking of why I left my last tech job at the audio company half a year prior. It was a very lax environment and where we didn’t follow any rules, requirements, or procedures. Instead we had a boss who would change his mind on a whim, break all his promises, scream at the top of his lungs while pointing fingers and play politics in the background, resulting in the same issues coming back over and over again.

The most severe of those issues was one with our Bluetooth chips which became flakey once you used them for a while. The very first thing I thought our new manager would address is help us resolve this problem while I was fighting my coworkers over making unnecessary app changes that wouldn’t help solve it. Low and behold, an entire year later, we end up coming back full circle with the same connectivity problem, adding completely unnecessary and arbitrary delays to resolve a firmware bug we've had forever! The worst part is I had been trying to solve the issue the entire time and prevent it from coming back, but that issue along with so many other cases just kept resurfacing because we had terrible systems and leadership in place.

I feel like I'm the kind of guy whos never going to argue or engage in pettiness, and unfortunately my anger builds up very slowly over the years before it finally lets out. Sometimes I feel like I'm a ticking time bomb, I take as much shit as I can possibly handle before I snap and go from 0 to 100 before I let out a death scream that frightens even the scariest people.

It happened at my last tech job where I knew if I'd stayed any longer things would have gotten even darker, either my terrible boss or I would have probably ended up hospitalized or in jail. I had a similar pattern occur a few years back with a close friend who would always take advantage of the people around him. Id watch him move in to someone's home over and over again acting like it was his turf until eventually it was my turn to be his next victim, where I ended up blowing up and cutting him off forever because of the money he had still owed me over all those years. Some people -- narcissist's in particular -- have no empathy and are incapable of seeing other perspectives, insisting on drowning instead of lifting each other up the way I would. If your on the same side the only competition should be against the people outside your circle and infighting could ruin you.

I think at the end of the day persistence and luck is a winning combination. You try over and over again until you end up winning, whether in business, with women, in music or in life. It is a very cutthroat and competitive world out there, especially when it comes to getting tech jobs in 2025 with the rise of AI. I'm probably going to make pizzas for a bit more and see if I can get a gig doing holiday lighting while I continue my job search. I think progress is always incremental and can be a virtuous cycle whereas the reverse is also true and problems can build up forever as it did at my last long-term job. No matter what happens I just need to keep grinding because I know I will get there… Eventually.

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