HiFaraz

http://haseebq.com/farewell-app-academy-hello-airbnb-part-ii...

Excerpt:

... many people are drawing the conclusion that I primarily got a job at Airbnb by being really good at negotiating, or gaming the system, or something like that.

If you have ever done a software engineering interview, you would know that this is completely absurd. There is no way to negotiate or charm someone into passing a software engineering interview. Much less 8 of them.

If you don’t know the ins and outs of object-oriented programming, database design, asymptotic analysis, binary search trees, or how to improve the cache efficiency of an algorithm, then you’re not going to pass a computer science-heavy interview at a top company. You don’t even have a shot at it.

The moral of my story is not “get really good at negotiating and you’ll get a great job.” Negotiating is important, and I certainly encourage everyone to negotiate!

But first, get good at the thing you’re doing. Then worry about negotiating.

I moved to San Francisco from Austin, Texas about a year ago because I decided I was going to earn-to-give. Since then I’ve been relentlessly trying to build a new career for myself, so I could earn more and donate more to charity.

Entering into App Academy, barely knowing the basics of Ruby, I came into the office and grinded every day, spending 80+ hour weeks just coding and studying. I’d come in at 9AM in the morning and leave around midnight, 7 days a week, sleeping in a bunk bed in SOMA in a 200 square feet shared room.

It’s certainly true that I probably have a mind that’s well-suited for coding. But it’s also true that I outworked almost everyone who was in my cohort. And when I was hired by App Academy to help teach the course, I continued working as hard as I could to get good at this.

I still stayed late in the evenings, I still came into the office on weekends alongside the students just to continue coding and learning more. I started an algorithms study group in the evenings where I taught students new algorithms that I had read about, and wrote specs and instructions to guide them through the implementation. I took over our entire algorithms curriculum and taught well over 100 students the basics of data structures and algorithms.

And of course, I was scared that none of this would matter. That having been an English major, having a non-traditional background, being 26 and too old to transition into tech, competing against 20 year olds who’d been coding since they were 10, I thought I must have no chance.

Thankfully, I was wrong. And I’m very, very lucky that I was wrong, because I was almost right.