I have been working in my current team for about three years so far and wanted to change the team to do different type of work. While I enjoyed debugging some hard problems and coming up with the fix, I have been wanting to consistently work on certain code base to learn the technology and deepen domain knowledge. Hence, I reached out those who I used to work with to gather some input/advice before I start to look around and today's blog is about what I have learned/gathered during this process.
First, do I really want a change?
One person whom I spoke to said it very clearly. He said that he could have made more impact on the product if he had stayed in my current team but he knew that he's not learning new technologies as much as he wanted in the current team. As such, he made a move and that has challenged him a lot for the past one year and felt that he grew so much. His new role/work is involved in big data/scale out work which helps him to be exposed to the latest hot topics and he's enjoying what he's doing. He mentioned that the process has been somewhat painful but that was intentional and he's glad that he made the move. As I was listening to him, I felt that I am in the similar situation that he was in a year ago and I want to have the similar changes in my own career. After that, I reached out to few more guys that I used to work with to gather some more information on how they found their new jobs. This helped me to what to look for and what's ahead when looking for jobs. With this, I started to look around opportunities inside the company mostly and started to send out my application with my resume based on HR job lists.
Second, what should I prepare for the interview?
You might say, "Interview?" Yes, we may still need to go through the interview process even if we change jobs inside the company. I learned that if I change jobs within the same group, I don't have to go through the interview but if I want to switch to different group, the interview process is required. As you guessed, preparing for the interview is not an easy task in computer science field. You will have to grab those programming algorithm books that I used in school and try to brush up your problem solving skills. Sometimes I wonder if this is really necessary in that we may never get to use some of these algorithms/data structures. Yet, that's the way it is so you will need to adapt to the system for the time being. :) Thanks to my friends, I came to know two very useful resources to prepare the interview and they are leetcode.com and EPI(Element of Programming Interview).
These two helped me immensely to be ready for technical interviews so let me describe these two a bit more in detail. leetcode.com is very helpful in that it has online judge site where you can solve the problems and submit your code to run the solution against test cases to see if your solution is correct and efficient. On top of that, you can also peek into other people's solution in discuss forum to see if there is any better solution. From this site I was able to check if my solution is correct and also learned how others solved the problem to enhance my solutions. It has about 150 problems to solve and you will surely learn much and confirm your answer via this web site to get ready for the interview.
Now, let me talk about EPI. In my opinion, EPI is one of the best books out there to prepare for the technical interview. It has a lot of questions and these questions are not easy but through these questions I felt that I am getting ready for the interview. It has questions that I never thought about so that helps you to think about such problems so that your brain gets exercised. In fact, some of questions that I studied from this book came up during the interview so that was very helpful.
I know that there are many more problems out there and I have heard from friends that some other companies tend to ask more difficult questions than what I have found from the above two resources. However, I think that these two have to be the base to start with so I highly recommend them!
Additionally, I would like to emphasize the amount of time you want to spend to prepare. Personally, it is very helpful if you can concentrate in studying the above two within short period of time so that you do not lose the context. It might be difficult to find time to study but I feel that you should treat this preparation as part of your job and take it seriously. Probably, it is a good idea to study for about three to four hours each day and seven to eight hours during weekends so that you can make significant process.
Third, which company/team to choose?
I did not have a lot of choices as I had four different interviews total. While going through the interview and getting to know each team/company, it became clear to me which team/company I would like to join. I believe that the interview process is not just one sided. It is not just the interviewee trying to impress upon the interviewer and pass the interview. It is also the interview's responsibility to sell their team/company so that the interviewee would like to come and work with them. I interacted with four different team/company, I felt comfortable with one particular team and decided to join that team. To be clear, I did not get offers from all these four places I had an interview with.
Lastly and perhaps most importantly, I would like to mention the importance of networking.
Making a career change is not an easy task but I have received a lot of advice and tips from friends/ex teammates that I worked with. I feel that keeping these relationships well is very important aspect of our career and as such, my advice to everyone is to reach out to friends/ex teammates for advice and you will be surprised how much you can learn from your peers to succeed in making career change. So if you are thinking of making changes in your career, send an email to your friend for lunch and ask them for their input.
All the best!
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