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Your experience is incredibly close to my own. I'd love to know if you also feel the same about a few other issues: - I used to have a massive impostor syndrom

Your experience is incredibly close to my own. I'd love to know if you also feel the same about a few other issues: - I used to have a massive impostor syndrome due to not having a CS degree. Joining FAANG alleviated perhaps 80% of it. (Just to be clear, that's not the reason why I joined FAANG; I just wanted to try a large corp after years in tiny startups.) It feels good, but I'm mourning it a little, because I believe it was a driving factor to how intensely I was trying to better myself. - I enjoyed solving all these problems. There's beauty in finding the most optimal solution to each of them. Binary heaps are plain beautiful, and suffix trees and arrays still blow my mind years later. I wonder if people here dislike this stuff because they were forced to learn it in college for a piece of paper, while we learned it on our own volition for a big jump in compensation. Maybe I'm just projecting because I hated school and college; many HNers seem to have enjoyed their studies, which is awesome.

scarmig 7y ago
> imposter syndrome Absolutely. And that imposter syndrome played a substantial part in motivating me to apply to FAANG :) I found myself in the doldroms for years afterward after starting at G, but I recently quit to do my own thing for awhile and have been so happy to find that I still have the capacity for joy and drive. And, yes, it was incredibly fun to study and solve these problems. Sometimes I'd end up going on unrelated tangents--cache-oblivious algorithms, a full history of quicksort and all its variations and partitions, how all the concurrent data structures in the Java standard library are implemented--and just spend all day reading about them and/or re-implementing them on paper on a sunny day in Golden Gate Park (and one of my Google interview questions was with a gruff Ukrainian guy who wanted me to implement a concurrent LRU cache, so that went swimmingly!). And so when people talk about how hellishly oppressive and difficult having to learn about binary search trees is, it just doesn't resonate with me. Even if not for the jump in comp, it was just genuinely fun. My background is math/physics, so perhaps that's part of it? Maybe many applicants just want to build something and just care about the final product, while the part of programming that I enjoy most is the brain teasers and making things work in the most efficient and elegant way possible.
- peferron 7y ago
  Thanks for answering. If you're still in the Bay, and feel like drinking a beer to our dear departed friend the impostor syndrome, feel free to email me :) it's in my profile.

scarmig 7y ago

> imposter syndrome Absolutely. And that imposter syndrome played a substantial part in motivating me to apply to FAANG :) I found myself in the doldroms for years afterward after starting at G, but I recently quit to do my own thing for awhile and have been so happy to find that I still have the capacity for joy and drive. And, yes, it was incredibly fun to study and solve these problems. Sometimes I'd end up going on unrelated tangents--cache-oblivious algorithms, a full history of quicksort and all its variations and partitions, how all the concurrent data structures in the Java standard library are implemented--and just spend all day reading about them and/or re-implementing them on paper on a sunny day in Golden Gate Park (and one of my Google interview questions was with a gruff Ukrainian guy who wanted me to implement a concurrent LRU cache, so that went swimmingly!). And so when people talk about how hellishly oppressive and difficult having to learn about binary search trees is, it just doesn't resonate with me. Even if not for the jump in comp, it was just genuinely fun. My background is math/physics, so perhaps that's part of it? Maybe many applicants just want to build something and just care about the final product, while the part of programming that I enjoy most is the brain teasers and making things work in the most efficient and elegant way possible.

peferron 7y ago
Thanks for answering. If you're still in the Bay, and feel like drinking a beer to our dear departed friend the impostor syndrome, feel free to email me :) it's in my profile.