I had no idea you essentially get “overtime” pay for on call at google. That’s how it should be imo. I’ve avoided on call jobs for the lack of extra pay for doing more work.
I really enjoy this advice and wanted to apply it to software engineering. I’m having trouble thinking about what to focus on and wanted to see what others would do if they decided to follow the advice.
I had been working in a call center for 4 years and had not had any growth whatsoever. I was broke, lost, and felt trapped at my job. I would look at job postings on dice and monster but didn’t have any of the skills mentioned and thought I would have to go to college to get a decent position. I didn’t have the money to go back to school so I tried something else. I e-mailed 30-40 tech companies, asking if they had any internships to get my foot in the door. Two companies replied back. First company was a desktop support position and the second company was a marketing internship at a coding bootcamp. I took the unpaid internship at the bootcamp. I realized I didn’t enjoy marketing right away but stuck with it cause it was better than a call center and I wanted to learn how to code. I ended up becoming friends with some of the engineering instructors and that’s when I was introduced to programming. They told me what to focus on, study, and build. So when I wasn’t at work or the internship, I was reading and building. After a while, I got my first job and been writing code for almost 8 years now.
I can’t lie, I got into it because of money but I ended up enjoying building web apps and solving problems.
Things that I enjoy now are the people. So many cool, smart, and helpful devs out there. The flexibility is really nice.
There wasn’t one book or website. Honestly, reading documentation or learning a concept and just practicing that one thing until you completely understand it helps me. There’s just so many resources online now so I’m sure there’s something for everyone.
