As the year of COVID-19 continues, my desire for a new career only increases exponentially every day. Going onto LinkedIn or GlassDoor and seeing entry level positions require 4 years prior experience in a professional setting only discourages me. The rare position that is immediate hire is remote, or a scan, or never responds. How is a self taught programmer supposed to find a job in this climate?

In this post, I want to go back in time to learn from an experience I had prior to COVID-19. The only recruiter from Philadelphia to actually show interest in me, and I missed out on my opportunity due to anxiety and imposter syndrome.

What is Anxiety?

For me, anxiety a tidal wave of negative emotion. It doesn't just effect me mentally, but physically as well. Sometimes I find it impossible to breath, or I might be unable to move, or I shake uncontrollably.

I find myself in these kinds of situations when I'm in a large gathering of people, or if I'm alone with my thoughts for too long. Sometimes, I don't even know why it happens. Those are usually the worst times.

However, I know that I have difficulty meeting new people because of my anxiety. I feel as though they will not like me, or I don't know if I'll like them, or if I'm coming on too strong, or if I'm being rude, or if I'm speaking coherently. This is basically an insight on how my thoughts process before meeting new people. Look at the puncuation, the speed at which the thoughts are coming. That's the avalanche that leads to anxiety.

Some people have practiced ways to boost their confidence and ignore these negative thoughts. In fact, that's what I'm practicing now. Mindfulness, recognizing what you're thinking and softly removing that thought, is a way to deal with anxiety.

Unfortunately, that's not where my mind was at when a recruiter from the healthcare industry in Philadelphia contacted me for a phone screening.

On the Phone

Let's start off by giving some pseudonames out - the recruiter's name is Dan and he's from HealthCo in Philly.

In the initial phone call, Dan is doing what he's meant to do - he is selling me on the company and seeing if HealthCo and the Junior Developer position I had applied for were a match for me. He's friendly and makes me feel comfortable. He describes the company as a utopia - an open floor plan which promotes communication, CEOs with open door policy, a free gym, kitchen, and keg. The works.

We decide that the position is a potential fit and we move onto the phone screening. I explain that this is my first time going through an interview process, so Dan was incredibly helpful. He told me the questions beforehand - read about HealthCo and its values, be able to talk at length about one of my projects, and be able to answer questions about your programming journey. Dan isn't tech savvy, he just needs to make sure I can speak about programming at length. It's only a 10 minute screening.

I had two days to prepare. I wrote everything down. I read, I practiced, and spoke in front of the mirror. I spoke with a smile. I feel confident.

Even ten minutes before Dan's phone call, I feel like I can do this. But once the actually interview begins, all that confidence oozes away.

He asks a simple question - what's your programming journey look like?

I word vomit - uh it's been four years and I started with HTML and CSS and then JavaScript and then I stopped for a bit but then I picked it back up. I did some Ruby, but I don't remember much, so I went back to JavaScript and I really enjoyed it. Then I worked on frameworks and uh that's how I did my portfolio project the MERN stack I liked doing it a lot and I just kept going, building pet projects, learning new tech, grinding away.

Not verbatim, but essentially what I think happened.

This happened with every question, for about 15 minutes. I swear that the only reason I was asked to continue with the interview process is because his last question for me was How much do you expect to be compensated? and I lowballed myself with an answer of 50k because that's something that I was not expecting at all.

After looking up HealthCo on GlassDoor after the interview, Junior Devs start at 75k to 85k. I low, low, lowballed.

The Wheels Come Off

I gained my confidence back during the take home code questions. They gave me three questions, of which I only had to answer two in any language I chose, and explained my thought process behind each question.

It was fairly straightfoward questions which only took me about an hour or two each. A lot of it was tedious, I remember that I had to pull data from a .csv file, read the data, and sort it alphabetically.

The most difficult part of the problems were when they asked me comp sci questions - is how I answered an optimal speed, or can I increase it. I enjoyed continuing my learning when I had to look up things like Big O, Log of n, recursion.

I was back in my elements.

Dan said that the technicians were impressed with my take home quiz, and the next step was a live coding with a group of real programmers.

This is where the nerves started hitting.

I have never been one for algorithms. I enjoy doing them, but I haven't gotten into a rhythm. So solving something like Bubble Sort could be easy, but identifying a problem as something that should be solved with Bubble Sort was not so easy.

Dan gave me one day to prepare for the live coding. That was a code red for me. After practicing a couple of problems on LeetCode, I struggled mightily and my confidence was completely shattered. I emailed Dan back and asked to reschedule a week later.

As I continued to struggle with algorithms and confidence in myself, that week became two weeks.

Eventually, Dan passed me off onto another recruiter.

The second recruiter scheduled a tech interview for the next day. I was finally breezing through a couple of algorithms and decided enough is enough. It was time to do this.

Then I realized that I wouldn't know a single person the Google Chat. They would all be looking at me, expecting me to be an algorithm genius. I had to know how to speak my mind and communicate clearly.

An hour before the interview, I sent an email to the second recruiter:

Thank you for the opportunity, but I do not think that I would be a good fit for this role. I appreciate your time, thank you.

Both Dan and the second recruiter emailed me back asking if I needed to reschedule, or what went wrong incase I could be recruited at a different date, but I ghosted them. I couldn't bare to continue, I felt so much shame and depression. I wasted my time and their time and I didn't even get the full interview experience.

Aftermath

I let anxiety take over. Instead of focusing on the positives, I nailed that take home quiz, Dan was really impressed with me after my phone interview, I focused on the negatives, they expect me to be perfect, they only want me for the low wage that I requested.

The worst part is knowing that the programmers weren't expecting an algorithm savant. They were probably just looking for communication and the ability to talk through a problem step by step. They wanted to see the thought process, and if I were to get stuck, they would have probably helped me out enthusiastically.

But I let the anxiety take over, which led to a lot of imposter syndrome and depression.

I rebounded and continued to learn and build. But now I have an uphill battle of fighting COVID-19's unemployment rate, remote jobs (not my first choice), Philly's lack-of tech scene, and anxiety going into my next tech interview.

For now, I can only focus on mindfulness, and letting those thoughts just drift away.