It started when my son was born
Ten months ago our son is born. Many things changes since then, including my job, my priorities and my life routines. I’d like to reflect a little and document the changes that I observed. This blog will focus on the job change part.
Getting noticed
Starting 2023, I didn’t plan to change my job. I was quite happy with my previous company. It doesn’t offer the best work life balance but it pays well. It also offer many employee benefits such as 6-week paternity leave, which is quite generous, and top-notch private health insurance. The macro economy was also quite uncertain with many tech giants laying off people around the world. But then in March some recruiters cold emailed me. I told them I wasn’t looking for jobs but wouldn’t mind knowing a bit more if the opportunity is great. many people do this to keep a tap on the job market and I’m no exception. A few week past and I got invitations from two companies that are worth to proceed with. One company is a well-known database company and the other was my current employer.
Interviewing with company one
The interview with the database company was 1-hour video call with the hiring manager. He asked about my past working experience, challenging problems I solved etc. . One question that stood out to me was the most lines of code I wrote for a project. I’ve never paid attention to this metric before but I’d say it’s on the scale of tens of thousands. The total lines of code I contributed in my career would be reaching hundreds of thousands. However, my tenure with a company was usually 2-3 years and I often worked on several projects. This limits the code that I wrote for a singe project. This eventually becomes one of the reasons they cited for rejecting me. I’m curious to know how would other people answer this question and what is this metric for you.
Anyway, I was not super impressed with the role nor their pay so I didn’t feel a thing about getting rejected. In fact, I need to thank them for helping me getting warmed up. That interview helped me spot areas I didn’t prepare very well such as demonstrating my strengths and skills set.
Interviewing with company two
Then I interviewed with my current employer. All interviews were through video calls and in total there were 3 technical rounds and 1 final HR round. The first two rounds were similar, starting with me talking about past experience, followed by interviewer asking related questions and followed by coding exercise. The coding exercise is like leetcode questions with medium to hard difficulty.
For the first around I finished the coding with one bug. For the 2nd one I finished coding without bug but when asked to simplifying the code, I didn’t quite get there. To be honest, after each interview I thought I’d fail as I thought they only accepts candidates who can produce bug-free solution. Maybe it’s my luck they let me pass.
The 3rd round was with 2 interviewers (the first 2 around are both 1-on-1), one was the hiring manager and the other was his manager who was also the site manager. It was a typical system design interview which need you to draw diagrams using a white-boarding tool. It was an interesting question and related to what the company does. I did OK with most of the questions but probably got a few wrong.
The whole interview process spread across more than 2 months. This is because I told them I was busy with my new born baby and I need some time to prepare for the coding exercise. They were quite understandable and eventually I accepted their offer. I’ve never been in this industry (social) before and I’m curious to learn the secrets that make the company successful. The fact that they pay a bit more (20%) also helps as I need the extra income to support my family as my wife wants to be a full-time mom for at least this year.
Current status
I’m 3 months into the job now and other than the huge workload and strict RTO policy, I’m mostly enjoying working here. I’m trying hard to improve my productivity so that I could get all things done in office without bring work back home but so far haven’t been successful. I recently adopted some new productivity tactics, which I will report back later, hoping to turning the situation around. If things stay the same I believe I’m better off having a slight pay cut but having a job that finishes at 5pm. But I’m being hopeful so let’s see how it goes.