The job market is really tough. It's really confusing
By the end of this video i will tell the story of how i found a
job in the middle of a global pandemic
hello and welcome to DataLeap this is professor Meatball (phDog) and he and i are
going to talk to you about how you a very very cool person can learn a
thing or two about my story of getting a job
in the global pandemic. Here at dataleap i hope to bring data science down to
earth but it's not all statistics and computer science
Sometimes, it's creating a plan for yourself
which i'm going to outline right here for you
To get a good job, in any day and age but especially now
you want to be able to first: tee up and square up. Make sure that you have
the right opportunities and the right resources in front of you
Second: grind. Make sure that you are constantly keeping good habits
and your best foot forward when presented with those opportunities you
gathered in that first step. The third and final step is a clean
execution when you are finally in the interview room when you have the take
home and you need to make sure you perform the best
you can possibly perform make sure that you have confidence
in how you've prepared everything up to that point
and swing for the bleachers. With all of these three steps in mind
you'll be able to find a job in this crazy world and i will tell you how i
followed those steps to find my current job. I currently work
full time as a data scientist in silicon valley and i did not have
this job before the pandemic started in fact i've never even stepped foot
into the office except for that one on-site interview. The two ways that i
was able to set myself up for success was one making sure that
i knew where to look for opportunities i wanted to find and
two making sure that i knew how to study by
looking at free resources that pertain to the kind of jobs i'm
looking for. The first step to getting this offer was
squaring up... [Meatball sniffs]
the first step to squaring up make sure that you have your team ready this is a
sports analogy after all so therefore you have to make sure that
you have friends or family that can keep you
accountable tell them about your goal of finding a job maybe it's because you
currently don't have a job or maybe it's because you want a better job to break
into an industry that you've always dreamed
about being a part of whatever the reason they'll be there as
a third party as an outside source to keep you
accountable the second way is to reach out to friends
in that industry already you need a helping hand and they actually have the
power to bring you to the front of the line when it comes to submitting your
resume with that you are shortening the amount
of time that you need to wait in line before
recruiters get to your resume the third step is to make sure you have the right
resources to start grinding effectively that leads us to the grind grinding is
probably the hardest step because it takes around 80 percent of
the time it professor how can you see
grinding is probably the hardest part of the entire process
because you are going to have to keep yourself accountable
on a day-to-day schedule you can do this when you still have a full-time job hell
you can do this in education you could do this when you are fully
unemployed and committing all of your time to it
since i have experienced grinding during all three of those
periods of my life i can tell you you're probably going to
be as dedicated the very first time no matter
what you're doing because it's hard to keep a schedule in
the very beginning you're probably going to spend two to three hours
procrastinating just putting it off you know doing
something else finding a way to numb yourself because you don't want to deal
with rejection on a day-to-day basis i have to tell you
right now it is not rejection if you don't get a response back in the
first week in the first three weeks in the first month what you
want to do is set yourself up for success and provide
deadlines getting an interview might be an easy part for you might be not
but if you don't know where to look that's going to be an issue
i'm going to put some helpful links down below so that you know where i
was looking when i found my job during quarantine in the beginning it's going
to be a lot easier to set artificial deadlines for yourself
companies that you may not be incredibly interested in but you know that their
interview process is solid that way you can follow along you can
put yourself in the right pressure now a big caveat here
is that if you sign up for two minute interviews if you sign up for too many
take homes you'll have a lot of work to do behind
the scenes and suddenly it'll seem like you have a
second full-time job this is especially true in tech the
take-home process seems to be a lot more popular nowadays because
there is a disproportionate amount of time that an interviewer needs to spend
grading a take-home and the interviewee needs to spend on
the take-home itself sometimes it can take up to 10-20 hours
and that's rough biting the bullet and and getting
that take-home under your belt is actually going to be super helpful
because now you are prepared for another interview
and you would have had the experience of that previous take home
something that helps a lot when you first start grinding
take out a piece of paper take out something concrete build a google
calendar if you want to but i need you to make sure that you are
creating something that you can see on a day-to-day basis sticky notes or
white boarding something that you can keep yourself
committed to one hour a day of looking through job
boards one hour a day of practicing tech interview questions on lead code
tech interview questions uh following other youtubers building
off of the platform that people have
provided you i will also leave some resources down in
the description so that you know exactly how i was able to prepare so as you're
grinding start submitting applications this is an
important step once you start hearing back the first
conversation is going to be with a technical
recruiter or someone with no technical experience we'll just be
asking you airplane test questions and the reason why i like to call it
airplane test is can you survive sitting on an airplane
for a couple of hours or sitting at the airport waiting for a
layover for a couple hours can you survive the likability test and
the most important thing here is to have a couple of star format
experiences laid out start with a situation a task an action
a result and end with some learning come to the table with what you came away
with and this is really helpful i would go over one where is a data
cache that wasn't being utilized by specific
product stakeholders and the task that i put for
for everyone was pitching a model that would train
on this data set and then would prevent churn
of users who might want specific technical support
the action that i took was i gathered the support
from you don't want to hear this story i gathered the support from key technical
pms eventually i had to get the signing off of a senior vice president
with the internal technical specs of the project laid out
i was able to get this pushed to a data engineering team who built the pipeline
and the result got implemented into production
so and the most important part learning make sure you
tell them that because of this experience perhaps you got
an innovative head start into getting more product experience you know maybe
you were able to connect more teams that didn't you normally talk
to each other and you learned that this is an
important task when creating this commiseration of cross product
responsibilities so have that for your very first interview
second a second round interview is likely a take home or maybe talking with
the hiring manager the person that you will eventually be reporting to
or maybe a senior data scientist on the team
so the second round interview with the hiring manager or some
senior data scientist is likely going to include some technical element
so that's what lead code has prepared you to do and usually it's not
too technical not too deep they're still trying to do the airport test with you
then you might have a take home and this take home is going to take anywhere from
one to five 5-10 hours depending on how
technical the role is the best way to tackle a take-home is
to make sure you're pacing it as if you were
practicing lead code questions don't put it off until the end
don't turn it all in in the very beginning
take a nice pace this is usually turned in within a week
and then you schedule your next round if that goes well so it went well for me
and i was able to then have a live coding session with the hiring
manager or another data scientist that i will be
working with the best way to tackle live coding is to take a step back and
think about what they want to learn about you they want you to
be able to be a good communicator they want you to come to
the room with energy and understand how to solve a problem
start to end always begin with a good understanding of the brute force method
if it's an algorithm they want you to crack
and if it's a product question which often happens with data science roles
have a good understanding of how product managers answer
these kind of questions i'll link a really nice free resource down below
that helped me a ton and it's not a sponsorship these guys are just really
good at doing preparation for these kind of
product questions finally if that goes well you'll have an
on-site and during the global pandemic you might have a virtual
on-site you'll head into the office or head on to a zoom meeting
and then have several back-to-back introductions
with product teams design teams sales teams
analyst teams whatever analogous technical teams
that you will eventually have as a stakeholder or
as someone who you will work alongside so these will range from entirely
technical if you're talking to the data engineering team
they might be asking for technical requirements or
they might talk about how a data warehouse is set up
to entirely non-technical a non-technical interview we might be a
designer asking you how you would set up an a b
test for this button versus this button
so be prepared to have a lot of energy moving into each of the sessions because
that person has maybe 30 minutes to an hour with you
but you have to be on the entire day don't worry if you're a more introverted
kind of person someone who takes their time they want to see a
measured amount of technical expertise and
good natured airport tests all throughout
so for me this step was the longest week of the entire process i had several
on-sites lined up back to back and it was hard
because you want to be able to set yourself up
with multiple offers in order to find the best optimization of these offers
this is an advanced strategy to set up all of your timelines more or
less in the same vein you want around two to five
timelines going at the exact same time because at that point
if you do well on a couple of on-sites then you will have
two to five offers and that helps a lot understand your self-worth for the final
step being able to look into the different
aspects of total compensation is rough and this
is one two three four a couple of ways that they can
increase the total compensation package in the comments below
no matter when you're reading this no matter if you get the offer mary if
you're starting at step one let me know what
part of the journey you're on this was data leap thanks for tuning in
we'll see you next time peace
to start [funny noises]