Jinyoung Oh, 23, recently received an offer to work as a software engineer after about a year of searching. He lives in Seattle. The following has been edited for brevity and clarity.
I started looking for jobs last September, before I graduated in May.
When I started college, I thought I would easily find a job, but during my sophomore and junior years, I realized the market was really competitive. By senior year, I worried I had made the wrong choice in studying computer science and thought, “I might be cooked.”
But I had already spent four years doing this, so I wanted to at least try one year of straight recruiting.
Just after graduation, I had a final round interview with a Big Tech company. For a week straight, I stayed home and did LeetCode, which is a problem-solving platform where you practice for interviews. During the interview, I thought I got most of the questions right, but I didn’t get the offer. There was no feedback.
After that, I was demotivated because I didn’t know how much more I had to prep or how competitive this market would be. I wasn’t hearing back from companies. I kept a spreadsheet and applied to at least 300 jobs every month, and I would often hear back zero or one time.
I focused on developing my skills
My brother does computer stuff as well. When I was in college, he told me, I had to practice during the summer. So I started doing the problems whenever I had time. During school, I was busy but still trying to solve at least a few problems every month.
After school, I was feeling kind of hopeless, but I kept solving practice problems and making my own projects to keep developing my skills so that I could be a better engineer.
Initially, I was using a lot of AI and was just prompting. I also wanted to make sure my coding skills were at the level companies would expect, so for some projects I worked on, like creating a reminder app, I tried to use as little AI as possible and coded everything manually.
My approach was to wake up, eat breakfast, go to the library, and work on problem-solving for three or four hours. Then I’d get lunch, spend three or four hours working on projects, and then one or two hours applying for jobs. I also valued the skills I could build more than the number of applications I sent out. Because what’s the point of getting an interview if you can’t pass the technical rounds?
Doing all the practice with my problem-solving skills — things like recognizing patterns and debugging — definitely helped when I did get interviews.
That dopamine hit
Getting a question right gives you that dopamine hit. It proves that I’ve been working hard for something, and now I can actually do it on my own.
It also gives you more confidence that you’re able to solve a question that you’ll get in an interview. Before I started practicing as much as I did, whenever I got an interview, I was like, “Oh my god, I don’t think I can solve this.” But after doing a bunch of practice, whenever I get a technical problem, I’m just confident. Because I spent a lot of time preparing, every time I got an interview, I would not get as nervous as before.
I recently got a referral from someone at a software company. I then took a technical test online. I got it all right, and the next round was in-person and took about five hours. As part of that, there were multiple rounds with different people. It was a long interview, but I was locked in. I was ready for this. After that, I got the offer.
In college, I spent so much time focusing on my grades and doing practice problems that I didn’t really do a lot of fun stuff. After graduation, I thought, “Why am I so hopeless? Why am I not getting a job?” I thought maybe it was wasted time. But now that I got the offer, it was all worth it.
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