As I realized that I wanted to switch from Mechanical Engineering to Software I put a lot of effort on both searching for jobs and prepping for jobs. I had just finished cs 162 at OSU when I became serious about trying to make the switch. My current job was not paying all that much and was asking me to work third shifts and sometimes come in on the weekend. I began the career hunt applying to tons of things on linked in. I read a lot of job posts that wanted people to know all sorts of frameworks or languages and I was really wondering how would I ever know all this stuff. I did not have a ton of success off the bat as my resume looked mostly like a Mechanical Engineer resume. I started to shift and call my self an Automation Engineer since I worked on automated systems and Boeing, though I really didn’t do much coding for them. This helped my resume get through the door a little better. I got a couple interviews at some start ups and one at Microsoft. It seemed that most of the interviews didn’t really focus on knowing all those frame works or languages and they mostly focused on Data Structures, Algorithms and OOP. I then really focused on just studying hackerrank. I ended up getting a software job at Boeing which was probably a little easier to land since I was already a Boeing employee. I kept applying to some of the big tech companies after getting the Boeing job and continued studying hackerrank. I got a couple interviews with Microsoft and got an interview with Google. I finally got an offer with Microsoft and pulled out from doing the final loop with Google because I needed to let Microsoft know before I could get the loops scheduled with Google. The Microsoft interview looked a lot like hackerrank questions. It was 5 hours with 5 whiteboard questions. In the end I had applied to about 200 Microsoft jobs and got one. I was just finishing Data Structures when I started my position. I still work at Microsoft. It has been almost 3 years. I really like it there and my job has a great work life balance. Much better than my Boeing Mechanical position.
