Quest
to California
Prolouge
My guitarist roomate and I were chilling on the porch talking about life when I told him how unfortunate it was that I didn't have a car and couldn't do residential work in construction or flooring. The tech job market wasn't good with the rise of AI and finding employment in the field was not an easy thing for all but a small minority of people. That’s when my guitarist come out with the truth I needed to hear, that the 6-figure tech jobs weren't coming and that the competition was all from people with advanced degrees and 10 years of experience. He was right, after all, I had a high school degree, just like him. Just because I landed 2 tech jobs before didn't mean it would happen again and I realized that maybe I was chasing a dream that wouldn’t materialize. I felt like giving up hope…
That’s when my guitarist said the most profound thing I will never forget, it went "When you stop chasing the white rabbit, when you realize the good things aren't coming for you and give up, when you least expect it, that’s when it happens!"
Both him and I were pretty drunk and tired so we knocked out for a bit. An hour or so I got an email notification from a medical research company I applied to. They were flying me out for an interview and I was going back to California!
Flying to Cali
The plane ride to Cali was weird, I had a drag queen hit on me and get my number, but first time for everything I guess. I made sure I studied up on all the relevant technologies and read through a few books during the flight to make sure I was on top of my game.
After landing at the airport I took a Lyft to the Hyatt hotel that the company had reserved for me. Along the way I saw the most gorgeous landscape with mountains stretching to the horizon. I spent that evening strolling and thinking about how much at stake, this opportunity was really make or break for me and my future.
The Setup
In the beautiful hills north of LA I headed to the headquarters where the interview was taking place. The HR person who helped me with the flight and hotel ended up greeting me in the lobby and showing me around the place. She asked if I was nervous and when I said yes she reassured me by saying I was one of their top applicants. It looked like a very professional environment with scientists, inventors, and doctors working side by side. I was brought into a conference room with a list of the 5 interviewers I was about to talk with, my laptop and resume at the ready. It felt like the setup for a video game with a list of the boss battles I was going to have to face:
1. Software Engineering Manager
2. Senior Cloud Development Engineer
3. Senior Director, Software Engineering
4. Senior Principal Engineer, Software
5. Firmware Engineering Manager
Each had 30 minutes with me and I was probably the only guy in the building without a college degree. Wish me luck!
Round 1
Software Engineering Manager
Round 1
My first interviewer was an intelligent Indian man who looked to be in his 40s, and he began with the basic questions like compensation, how I handle conflict in the workplace, and how quickly I'd be able to make the move out there from Chicago.
He looked over my resume sternly through our conversations, asking what classes I took in school and about programming languages I've worked with. That’s when we began talking about C and C++ and I knew we had a common passion. I thought I was on a good track until we started talking about overloading functions, I explained in C you cannot have the same function signature with different parameters while in C++ it is allowed, which he followed up with asking what the difference between overloading and overriding functions was in C++. I gave him an answer but unfortunately it was not the one he was looking for.
He looked once more at my resume and back at me telling me that he wouldn’t consider me for a Senior position because my professional experience in the industry was 2 to 3 years at most while they were looking for 6+ years. He told me he would rather say it to my face then to go behind my back and I shook hands with him saying I respected him for it.
After that he told me the key difference between overloading and overriding was that the former happens at compile time while the latter happens at runtime. He left the room and I knew I was completely taken down by the first boss I encountered. It felt like the first battle in a Dark Souls game.
He was only the first interviewer. There were still 4 more to go!
Round 2
Senior Cloud Development Engineer
Round 2
The second interviewer joined remotely and talked about work that he does and the companies tech stack. It was a mid to high-level discussion mainly on the frameworks we used in the past and the mobile development in general. I was more familiar with Flutter as he was with ReactJS while the company was using Xamarin and switching to MAUI, which is common for the medical industry.
We both agreed that declarative UI's was definitely the way to go as opposed to the XML and XAML based schemas that Java-based and C# applications used. In fact, I told him at my first tech job my main project was to convert their existing codebase to using declarative UI in Jetpack Compose. Overall the talk went pretty well.
3 more interviewers to go.
Round 3
Senior Director, Software Engineering
Round 3
The third interviewer was less interested in my technical abilities and more interested in me personally. He was larger gentleman with a bald hairstyle around my dads age, seemed like he had a more jovial personality.
Very early on into our discussion he threw the biggest curveball, saying "Tell me about yourself!" I thought for a second and asked if he liked music, and after he said he did I told him I played in a funk band in Chicago. I even told him about the last show I played at Cubby Bear where I fell off the stage!
When we talked about tech he mentioned that the company was open to re-evaluating the best technologies to suit their needs and I heavily advocated for Flutter like I did with the previous interviewer. After that we went back to the banter talking about things like the best places to visit in LA and Chicago. It felt like a very friendly chat.
3 down, 2 more interviewers to go.
Round 4
Senior Principal Engineer, Software
Round 4
The fourth interviewer was an older man with a quieter demeanor, I would describe him as the complete contrast of the previous individual on the list. The first thing he told me was "we're gonna go deep" meaning deep into my knowledge and technical expertise.
This talk was by far the most technical and the most important one, I owed being in that room to him and our initial screening call. We talked about low-level things like Bluetooth, dealing with race conditions, asynchronous programming, interpolation problems, as well as the differences between Android and iOS systems. He mentioned that few people have the skillset to work with BLE and I could tell he felt like I knew what I was talking about.
That was a relief, I thought the hardest part was over. 1 more interviewer to go and I'm free.
Round 5
Firmware Engineering Manager
Round 5
The fifth and final official interviewer was a well-to-do older man who actually did his background research about me and the companies I worked with! The conversation started with going over my last two roles and how the product development involved. I could tell he was thorough, he made mention of my LinkedIn profile and even downloaded the last app I designed at the audio company I worked for previously.
We talked about the technical side a good amount, including things like what I've done in Java and Kotlin as well as what chips we've used in our teams for Bluetooth communication. I think all my stories clicked and both of us respected each others domains a lot.
That was the last official name on the list, I gave a sigh of relief thinking that the interview was over…
Bonus Round
Two Versus One!
Bonus Round
I thought it was finally over, but then two more guys around my age walked into the room. They were the younger engineers and in hindsight meeting them was a good sign of my performance. First they asked me what I thought I was best at and what my favorite thing to do was. I had to think about it a bit and over the course of our talks I think I could explain myself, claiming that what I'm best at being a middleman whos good at seeing issues from different perspectives and my favorite thing to do is the lower-level side of development since there is a certain joy in solving hard problems.
Apart from that they asked questions concerning AI, technical debt, and some more personal things like my passion for music. When I discussed my past jobs I explained that the thing I miss most about my first tech job as opposed to the previous one was that there were good systems and procedures we followed in the medical industry, with requirements and documentation. Working at the audio company we didn’t have any of that, all we had was temper tantrums, changing minds, and talking about blame 24/7 as opposed to actually getting things fixed.
After our discussion I thought it was finally over, but I was wrong!
Lunchtime
It was 12pm and I had been in the same room for 3 hours with 7 different people. It felt like a game of Elden Ring where the first boss takes you out and you slowly have to make your way to the top, with each subsequent boss having a different combat strategy and weakness. Thats when the first interviewer and the fourth offered to take me out to lunch with them at a brunch place.
I was nervous the entire car-ride with them because these were 2 of the judges who would decide my fate at the company. During the ride they asked what I was doing currently to which I answered I was flooring, but working with apps has always been my passion and career goal for me. I told them I visited California 2-3 times a year, usually for conferences, and have had a vision to move out there for quite some time. I told them I got lucky with my first tech job and I prepared a test project for them called Schrödinger's Cats which we had a laugh about.
Once we sat down to eat I told them my legend.
When I was finished they asked "so why did you apply here?" to which I responded "I worked in the medical space before so I figured I'd be pretty good at this". Once we were done eating they dropped me off at my hotel, I thanked them for the food, and waved goodbye to them.
Back Home
Its been a week since that fateful day I flew out to California and I hadn't heard back from the company. I spent too much time pre-occupied with drinking to get my mind off it since it already seems like its been too long to wait for an answer. It feels like my whole life, everything I've studied and all the experiences I've went through in life have led up to this moment and I am being put up to the ultimate test.
I applied to more jobs as I went through my email, one of which -- I picked it by random -- was from a recruiter who was also in the medical sector. Her number was listed and the email said she tried to reach me so I ended up calling back. We talked for 5 minutes after which she mentioned that the job was in the LA metropolitan area to which I answered I was just flown to Burbank very recently for a final interview. It turned out we were talking about the same company! I told her I did not yet know the result of the interview to which (I don’t know how she could know this) she replied that this particular company would likely get back to me on Thursday which was 2 days from now.
Its been a week since I came back from my trip and havent heard an answer from the company on their decision. Applying to some local stores since I probably not gonna get the job. My life hangs in the balance now and I'm hoping for the best. I know I need to keep applying, junk my broken car, and pawn some items to get by in the meantime. The whole experience felt like catching a glimpse of my dreams just to have it taken away...
Woke up the next day, had a pretty weird experience. If last weeks interview was the longest I've had this was by far the shortest: applied on Indeed, got a call 5 minutes later, and showed up an hour after to be a driver. Over the phone we had the wildest conversation, the moment this guy learned I spoke Russian he started telling me stories about how "the Mexicans are gonna start a revolution" and "they're gonna overthrow me!" It was a machining company and I had no idea what I just walked into. I talked to this Russian guy for about 5 minutes in person and we concluded its probably not gonna work out cause they are looking for someone longer term. Its for the best anyway since I think I dodged a bullet with that one
My guitarist and I were drinking and jamming today, I told him I'd failed the mission to get us to California together. Im just gonna get a regular job and move on with my life, probably gonna start working at Dominoes with him at the start of the week. Dominoes to 6 figures would make for a nice story I suppose...
Epilogue
Today, nearly 2 weeks after my interview I got the email with the bad news, I didn't make the cut. Sometimes, no matter how well you think you did, even with every answer at the tip of your tounge and the greatest charisma, your still going to fail. Sometimes it doesnt matter if your the best man for the job. I probably lost to someone with a PhD since a college dropout stood no chance against the entrenched system. The competition for this Senior role was pretty intense, but at least I gave these doctors and scientists a run for their money!
But I havent given up hope yet, 3 hours from now I have a video call from another company based in California, located just north of San Diego. This is also for a Senior position and Im sure it will go well since the interviewer is Russian just like me. Ill make sure to study up on embedded development since he might have some questions in that area, and I think its also important to follow back up on existing job leads and my recruiter contacts. Life sometimes feels like a mirror and its important to follow back up with people cause you never know what opportunities will come out of it.
Once I put my mind to something, its only a matter of time before it happens. Eventually...
From Dominoes to 6 figures would be a pretty cool name for a song.