You’ve hit a major milestone as a computer scientist and are becoming a capable programmer. You now know how to solve problems, write algorithms, and analyze solutions; and you have a wealth of tools (like data structures) at your disposal. You may now be ready for an internship or (possibly) an entry-level software engineering job. But can you land the internship/job? It depends in part on how well you can solve new technical problems and communicate during interviews. How can you get better at this? Practice! With the support of Google’s recruiting and engineering teams we’ve provided tips, examples, and practice opportunities in this course that may help you with a number of tech companies. We’ll assist you to organize into teams to practice. Lastly, we’ll give you basic job search advice, and tips for succeeding once you’re on the job.
Imposter Syndrome Gallery
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来自 University of California San Diego 的课程
Mastering the Software Engineering Interview
424 个评分
University of California San Diego
424 个评分
课程 4（共 5 门，Specialization Object Oriented Java Programming: Data Structures and Beyond）
从本节课中
Live coding: the technical phone interview and beyond
Now that you’ve gotten warmed up, it’s time to practice your coding skills. One of the things you’ll almost certainly be asked to do during a technical phone interview is to code up a solution to a problem in a shared text document (e.g. Google doc) while you are on the phone with the interviewer. This experience can be intimidating, unfamiliar and humbling if you are not prepared, so this week we will give you lots of practice and tips for getting through this part of the interview with flying colors.
与讲师见面
Mia MinnesAssistant Teaching Professor
Computer Science and Engineering
Leo PorterAssistant Teaching Professor
Computer Science and Engineering
Christine AlvaradoAssociate Teaching Professor
Computer Science and Engineering
[SOUND] Hi, my name is Monserrat Gonzalez.
I'm a software engineer in the speech recognition team at Google.
Very early in my career, I experienced imposter syndrome,
since actually when I was in high school.
I took some optional CS classes.
And I realized that I was the only woman in the room when I entered those classes.
I actually hated computer science when I was in highschool.
I hated the computers, they always gave me the blue screen.
But when I started looking at these classes, they seemed more like logic,
and math, and
also a cool way to do things that mattered and that could impact people.
So I started this classes and I feel like, I'm not only the only
woman in the room, but I'm also very different to the rest of my classmates.
They are all programming 24/7,
in the corner together, playing with video games with your computers.
In the classes, I would always be in the corner, and
they would be all grouped together in the other corner.
Anyways, I didn't let that stop me from going ahead and doing what I liked.
So I went for a computer science degree in college.
And then, fast forward a couple years and I find myself at Google
doing an internship in the speech recognition team, which was my dream team.
And then, in my first week, I realized that most of my teammates were
PhDs with years of experience in the field, well, I was an undergrad
that had just one little project that was mildly related to speech.
So in my first 101 with my manager I decided to straighten things up and
confess that I actually did not have much experience in speech recognition
to what she said.
Don't worry, whatever you have to learn, you learn.
And that was thrilling.
For the rest of my internship, I spent all my time learning about speech and
about Google.
I'm working hard on my project.
After a couple years, I joined Google as a software engineer full time.
Also, in the speech recognition team and
it turns out that my first project felt a lot like my internship.
It was a very ambiguous and ambitious project
where I felt like I maybe lacked the skill and experience to complete it.
And I felt the imposter syndrome all over again.
Maybe, they didn't know the complexity of the project and
maybe misunderstood my experience.
And they gave me this huge project right after joining Google.
But I did the same thing.
I started working on it and slowly making progress.
And a couple of months after,
I realized that every time you get a project, you feel this way.
You feel the imposter singer where you feel like maybe you're not capable enough,
maybe someone made a mistake, maybe someone
misunderstood your skills, and it turns out that almost everyone feels this way.
Whenever they have a new project and a new challenge.
But the difference is that they always keep at it and
the secret is also that even though I always felt a misfit,
maybe I didn't belong either because I was a woman or
maybe because I was the less experience in the room, it didn't matter.
The thing is that you have to keep working at it.
You have to ignore the imposter syndrome, just put it aside,
and I won't promise that it won't go away, but
it won't stop you from doing what you like.
>> That the worst experience for me with the imposter syndrome was actually when I
was a graduate student, actually here at UC San Diego.
So after I finished my undergraduate degree
I actually became a commissioned officer in the United States military and
I served in that role for four years, I learned great things in that position.
I learned how to manage equipment,
how to lead people, how to succeed in high pressure situations, and
how to trust other people on a team, how to work well with a team.
But what I didn't do during those four years was use computer science in any way.
So I'd had my bachelor's degree in computer science, and
I took a four-year hiatus.
From computer science, before I went to graduate school.
And I tried a little bit to brush up before I started graduate school, but
honestly, I didn't brush up that much.
And then, that first quarter of graduate school is when this became
the most apparent.
And I remember this one moment really well.
I was in a graduate operating systems class and
I was trying to remember undergraduate operating systems,
which at that point I think I'd taken five years prior.
And I'm just struggling to remember the very basics of operating systems.
And one of the students in the class asks a question.
I can't remember if he said explicitly or if it was the tone of the question.
But he made it clear that he'd worked at Microsoft.
On a team, I was solving the problem that we're all discussing in Linux for Windows.
So I'm feeling already a little vulnerable,
because I don't remember this material and now I'm hearing from someone who's clearly
an expert in this area, who's supposedly my classmate, who is my classmate.
Is a very stressful moment, and it took a while to get over it.
It took around at least two years of succeeding in classes and getting good
research projects going before I really actually started to feel that much better.
And that's one of the things I kind of realized over the time,
is that everyone goes through imposter syndrome.
And we all have weaknesses which
allow our minds to have those feelings of imposter syndrome.
But what we can do is, first of all,
recognize what imposter syndrome is when we start feeling that way.
The second thing we can do is start thinking about all the strengths we
bring to the table.
We all have some measure of weaknesses and strengths.
And while you're being hired for
a position it's based on your strengths, not necessarily your weaknesses.
So again, I think by recognizing the issue when it comes up and
by focusing on your strengths, you can help to overcome this.
>> My name's Howard, I'm a software engineer.
When I think about the notion of imposter syndrome I think about one's
inability to really understand and value their competencies,
knowledge bases and skill sets.
And so, this typically comes out to play in interviews.
When I think about interviews that I've been in myself, imposter syndrome is
definitely something I've experienced and something I've had to overcome.
More recently in an interview, full round of interviews that I went through
in order to work at the current company I am at now, I had to address the process
things from head on, by choosing to view my interviewer as an ally,
someone who's on my team, someone I already work with.
They were simply just coming to me, me being already a really bright, smart
software engineer with a really tough problem, and because I'm on their team,
we're just in a room on a whiteboard coding to figure this thing out.
When I looked at my reviewers and allies of someone who was against me,
it kind of gave me some of the power back.
It allowed me to see her as someone who is on my side, who's rooting for me.
Who wants me to effectively solve the problem.
And I'm simply helping her out.
Now, I'm a software engineer at Google, of all places.
And it's only because of my ability to really address, head on,
imposter syndrome.
Interviews aren't easy.
They're actually really hard.
It took me four times before I actually landed my role here.
And so, I think, when you get declined in an interview, that means try again.
It does not mean to stop.
>> So I started with imposter syndrome all the time.
Because I like high-level thinking and
I am a technical person and I like technical details.
But I don't tend to keep a lot of technical details in my head
at any given time.
So when people around me start throwing out a lot of technical jargon and
technical details, I start to really panic.
And start to think, my gosh, am I supposed to know all that stuff?
Is that word supposed to mean something to me?
I don't know what I'm doing here.
I shouldn't be here.
I don't have enough knowledge to be here.
So that happened to me a lot in graduate school.
That's happened to me continually ever since then.
Sometimes that happens to me in the classroom when I'm teaching.
I start to question my ability to teach a class
when students are asking me about some details,
specifications some language that I just don't know that detail off hand.
So in those cases I really have to just calm myself down.
It's happened to me so many times that now I can kind of recognize it.
But it took a long time before I really started to become comfortable with
the fact that I don't need to have all those technical details in my head.
And just because I don't have them in my head doesn't make me any less smart,
doesn't make me any less of a good person, doesn't make me any less productive.
So once I kind of remember that, everything starts to feel better again.
But it happens to me regularly, even now.
So I feel imposter syndrome a lot lately as I've started to become a little more
senior in my career.
And people are kind of looking to me as a leader or
as somebody who has knowledge to share with others.
And it took me a long time to get comfortable in that role and
I'm really still not comfortable in that role.
I still see myself as this beginning person who's very early in her career and
doesn't really know much.
I'm still learning from others.
How can I possibly have anything to teach people who are coming up behind me?
And so, when I'm put into the role as a mentor or when I'm working with my new
colleagues, I sometimes panic thinking, my gosh, they know so much more than me.
What am I doing here?
How am I possibly in this role that's senior to them when they're so
much better than me?
And I have this, again, this moment of panic.
And what usually helps me in these situations is actually to just voice that
feeling to the people that I'm mentoring.
And they'll tell me things like, I can't believe you just said that.
You seem like somebody who has so much experience.
There's so much I can learn from you.
But I'm glad you just said that because I feel that way all the time.
So we kind of had this connection around this imposter syndrome.
So that's a role that I'm still really getting comfortable in, and
I know that I'll face this imposter syndrome probably for the rest of my life.
But I now have ways to deal with it.
>> Hello, my name is I'm a side rail liability engineer.
One of the biggest struggles I faced during my
career journey was when I transitioned from hardware to software engineer.
I remember that back then, I was working in a hardware company.
And I'd realized that I was enjoying much more the software pieces of my projects,
than the hardware ones.
I gave it a thought and decided to talk to my manager about changing my career path.
When I talked to him, I got very surprised.
He said, and I quote, it is close to impossible.
I got worried about it, but I decided to give it a try despite that.
So I started learning a lot of new things, and
almost everything was very different to what I was used to.
This became very challenging to me, but at the same time, it was very exciting.
A cool thing about working in a tech company like Google
is that everyone has an opportunity.
So I got mine, and here I am.
However, I was still afraid that I will have to work double or
much more harder than all my peers because evidently all
of the them have Computer Science degree.
Soon after I met my manager and all my team, I realized that I was wrong.
Technology is changing.
Software is changing so
fast that everyone has to be learning and working and developing themselves.
Even from the most senior engineer to the new hire, everybody is learning.
So I learned that if you have the willingness
and the passion to do what you want, you can actually do it.
>> The root of my imposter syndrome somehow comes from the fact that
my interests are really interdisciplinary and I work in a lot of different areas,
which means that my background and
my education has really sampled from a lot of different fields.
So my undergraduate degree was in engineering and
then philosophy and then I went off to math grad school and
then now I'm working in a computer science and engineering department.
And so, the exciting thing about that is that I get to work and
interact with lots of people and think about all sorts of really cool project and
problems and hard problems about different fields.
But the tough thing for me and where I feel like an imposter sometimes is that,
I don't have that body of a shared experience
that some other people have if they've just started in one track and
gone through that track their entire education or career.
And so, sometimes I feel like I'm going to have these big gaping holes in my
background or my knowledge because I didn't take that one,
Processing Architecture course or that I didn't take that one.
Really heavy duty whatever it is there's like this fears in the back
of my mind that I'm just not going to fit what a Computer Scientist looks like or
what a mathematician looks like because my journey is a little bit different.
And then, on top of that there's the fact that women are under represented in
both of this discipline and so sometimes I get caught up in myself about some,
my insecurities will show through and it's not going to reflect poorly just on me,
but on all women and maybe I should just not cut out for it.
And then, I have to take a deep breath and step back and say,
actually I do have a lot of experience and I have done a lot and what I find works
really well is to make connections with other people and work collaboratively and
solve those really good problems and really hard problems.
And by keeping at it and keeping working and making these accomplishments and
having these accomplishments.
Little by little, I feel more and more like I belong, and
like this is the right path for me.
