You are right. We came in letting hosts open experience stores in Airbnbs (try on an Oculus at a hosts home). Difficult to attribute our sales so we moved on.
COVID hit and we had the itch to look at the browser in a different light. Building a browser seemed intimidating...but it was quarantine. Long story short, built a few different ideas and here we are :)
Building a browser does seem intimidating! What technical considerations made you finally take it seriously? Any advice for folks trying to do the same or taking on another intimidating project?
Started just by building Chromium and Brave and poking around in there and making small changes.
Chromium is huge but has terrific documentation (once you find the current copy) and Google hosted code search. Digging through crbug.com often helped point us in the right direction.
2 unlocks that made us confident to pursue this project:
1) Repeatable way of patching Chromium and keeping up with upstream changes
2) Writing UI in web technology instead of C++ Views toolkit.
Interviewing is a skill and via the right practice you can get better at it. I went down that path and got much better at it. Some things to think about:
- you can do practice interviews with peers, some people will be good and some will be bad. Anyway, record them, play them back, take notes on how to get better, and repeat.
- get a list of sample questions, all of them, and figure out through some thought what the best answer to each is, and then drill on that. I used Anki, made hundreds of cards
- learn about MECE and make your answers MECE compatible
YMMV but I was able to really make a leap via some deliberate practice over the course of a couple months.
Every company I’ve worked at in tech in the SF bay area has at a minimum been completely tolerant of LGBTQIAP+, to having dedicated employee resource groups, so these companies exist. My rec would be: not to bring it up in the interview, not because you are hiding it but because it is not relevant in that phase. Either pre or post interview you can check out the company to see if they fit.
I typically screen companies as it's somewhere in their core values. But, I've been burned in the past by this, and still landing the interviews as how I present myself now is a challenge in this market.
This is impossible to answer without more information. How much money do you need? What’s your personality like? Were there any programming adjacent roles you thought were interesting?
Obviously this is a tough question because CoL can vary a lot, but I just want enough to live a middle class lifestyle covering living costs and having some spending money to enjoy, but preferably not something that will eat up all my time (a friend of mine was a nurse which pays well on pepper but she was desperate to get out because of hellish hours)
> What’s your personality like?
I’d like to think I’m easy to get along with, and moderately sociable, but I don’t have outgoingness for something like sales. I’m still a tinkerer/hacker at heart, but I’m just not good enough to be competitive on a job market.
> Were there any programming adjacent roles you thought were interesting?
Yes, there are still even programming roles that I think would be interesting, but “interesting” seems mostly out of reach. I’ve always been interested in security, but not the sort of positions I could get. Occasionally I’ll still see a programming job that I think would be interesting, but they’re usually highly technical senior positions in domains I wouldn’t qualify for anyway.
Obviously giving life advice based on a couple paragraphs is a little suspect, but it sounds like you have some technical skills and are interested in security, so why not just go in for that? Some thoughts:
- security is really hot right now, my last role was a PM for security, many many companies have serious challenges in this area right now
- people who are in it really love talking about it, it would be pretty easy to talk to some people in the field and see what’s a good fit
- speaking of security, there are so many roles it’s hard to imagine that there isn’t a role for you. Some are really technical, some have 0 coding at all (like program management)
- nobody wants to hire a downer, so work on your confidence game. Or learn to fake it
- consider some certs or some other LinkedIn bait to get recruiters to contact you, applying directly seems like a waste of time generally
- think about your narrative, e.g. you aren’t lost, while you were working you realized that you were really into security and have spent the last X amount of time skilling up on it
- don’t worry about comparing yourself to others, just try to get a little better everyday
- think about how you can get 1% better today in security, and do it, then repeat
- same as above, but for interviewing, attracting recruiters, and also working on your headspace
- nobody ever follows this but use Anki to build skill mastery for everything
- if you are weak in an area but consistenly add in 50 cards a day then you’ll get good fast
That’s my take on it anyway. Good luck. The universe wants you to succeed. Hiring managers are hoping that you are the one that can solve their problems. Recruiters are rooting for you so they can get their bonuses, managers are rooting for you to make them look good. I’m rooting for you and I don’t even know you! And so on.
I feel very fortunate to have landed a non technical faang role early in the year. Simply applying never worked but when I was recruited I always made it to the final round if I wanted to. The whole process took a lot longer than before. I really recommend doing lots of mock interviews, drills, and other prep. Think 20 hours a week until you get the job.
In a business there are profit centers and cost centers. Life is better when you work in a profit center. Having worked in security this general rule applies.
As someone non-technical grinding interview prep has been a game changer for me. So I would say yes, probably. Figure out what questions could be asked, then practice via study, mock interviews, and Anki. There’s only so many questions they can ask, and if you practice them all and are fluid then you will be in great shape.
