How to get a job in the USA and what is wrong with Google: the experience of a Ukrainian developer - ForumDaily
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How to get a job in the USA and what is wrong at Google: the experience of a Ukrainian developer

Developer Vladimir Zhabyuk has been in the profession for 17 years. His track record includes more than 10 companies, including Twitter, Google, LinkedIn. The project DOU Volodymyr talked about his career in Ukraine and the United States, about what he didn't like about Google and why he decided to return to Twitter. The developer also analyzed his experience in a startup and described in detail the features of interviews in large American companies.

Photo: Shutterstock

Education and career in Ukraine

Vladimir was born in Ivano-Frankovsk, where he studied at a gymnasium with in-depth study of mathematics, physics, and English. In the tenth grade he got a computer, then he began to be interested in programming, but at home, not at school. Tried to figure it out with Delphi and C ++, wanted to see how difficult it is to get a visual result. For example, make a game that. It felt a bit like magic to him. And simple things worked out.

After school, I decided to enter the Kiev-Mohyla Academy for computer science, and gained a knowledge base in programming, algorithms, mathematics, and even humanities subjects. This was enough to find a job already in my third year - at the age of 20. The company developed software for designing pipelines for the Russian Gazprom. Vladimir was the only candidate who completed the test task. His next job was in a foreign company. He studied and worked at the same time until he graduated from university.

Vladimir notes that the growth of his salaries was non-linear. At the first job he received 400 dollars, at the next - 500-600, a year later - 1200, in the fifth year he became Team Lead and received 3,5 thousand, and then the salary was approximately the same. It took him two and a half years to get to his first job as a Lead.

The first job for Team Lead was at Reuters. Vladimir worked on their paid subscription platform with a team that regularly traveled to New York. This was the first experience of traveling abroad. And his experience at GlobalLogic as a Scrum Master helped him significantly expand his skills.

Moving to the USA

Since 2008, Vladimir began to look for options on how to travel abroad. I applied for a resume, but then it didn't work out too well. In 2010, EPAM contacted him and said there was an onsite position in the United States. True, it was not clear yet exactly what it was and where, but it was agreed that he could have an interview with their customers, and they would start preparing an HB-1 visa for him to leave. At first he was supposed to go to Florida, but at the last moment something changed and he was told that the position was from Expedia in Seattle. Therefore, in early 2011, he moved to the United States. Six months before that, Vladimir got married, and was already leaving with his family.

In Ukraine, Vladimir earned enough and never worried about money. Things have become more difficult in the US: wages have increased, but costs have also increased significantly. There was also language adaptation. In Ukraine, his English was enough to work with customers, but communication in everyday life is different. Moreover, he has never worked or lived in other countries. It was necessary to deal with issues of housing, health insurance, buying a car, furniture... Every day there was something to decide. And also a new environment, new friends... For the first 3-4 months, all this was unusual and a little uncomfortable.

At the first job, he worked for 11 months. He liked EPAM: they helped with the relocation, acclimatization, supported in working with the customer so that there were no problems with communication, they consulted on medical services and the like. Vladimir led the team, which was usually based in Kiev, and also helped recruit the Business Intelligence onsite team at Expedia and the neighboring EPAM teams that worked for Expedia.

Why did you decide to look for a new job? Firstly, Vladimir arrived on an HB-1 visa and did not know how quickly the company would make him a green card. Second, he saw a difference in payment between his position as a contractor through EPAM on Expedia and what he could earn in other companies. The difference was big. And, thirdly, motivation: he wanted to work on something complex, non-trivial, on a project that would involve millions of people ... And in order to realize this goal, he had to look for a new job. So he started interviewing.

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Features of interviews in the USA

The first interview was at Amazon. According to Vladimir, he passed it “normally” but was not accepted. Then there were interviews with several more companies, including Google. Didn't make it there either. He failed three out of five interviews. Why? He proposed too complex solutions and did not have time to complete them completely, did not listen to all the advice of the interviewer and was simply confused.

Vladimir immediately felt the difference from the interview in Ukraine. Before moving, he probably had over 50 interviews, and he did even more. He prepared for interviews, had experience in how to get through them, but this experience was not relevant in the United States.

What's the main difference? In Ukraine, during interviews they ask not general, but specific things. The intention is that the person will no longer study very hard for this position, but will come and be able to work right away. In the States, large companies conduct interviews that are much longer than in Ukraine and multi-stage. Mostly there are one or two telephone interviews. One of them is with a manager or recruiter, when they check how interested the person is and whether he has the necessary experience. And after this there may be one or two more telephone interviews - technical ones, when they give a simple task.

Then there will be an onsite interview - 5-6 interviews, taking the whole day, 6-7 hours. One of the interviews is conducted by a manager to find out whether the candidate can work in a team, whether he is willing to listen and change in accordance with feedback. That is, they look at how much a person is trying to become better, develop, grow, how motivated, open, honest he is, and whether it will be a pleasure to work with him. Because the work is not individual, but team work.

Then technical meetings. This could be three coding interviews - with the same questions as a phone interview, but a little harder. Often the interviewer first gives high-level tasks, so you need to ask clarifying questions. This is what is expected, that a person will clarify all the details and requirements. Then the candidate begins to write code on the board or computer and at the same time tell what he is doing and why he is doing it this way and not otherwise.

If the code is written, it is clear that it works, they may let you write unit tests on it, ask you to estimate the time complexity of the algorithm, and perhaps ask you something else about algorithms. And then they will make the task more difficult. The best questions are those where there are 2-3 levels of difficulty, the last level being very difficult. This method helps to gradate candidates.

There may also be 1-2 questions about Systems design. For example, design a Twitter system where some users can write tweets and others can follow them. You need to immediately ask the interviewer clarifying questions: how many users, how many tweets can be written, how long should they be stored in the system, does the system need to be available all the time all over the world, and the like. Once the interviewer answers these questions, you should start drawing the architecture on the board. Additional questions may arise here; you may also be given new requirements, due to which you will need to change the architecture of the entire system. For Senior candidates, they often conduct more interviews on Systems design and less on coding.

Now Vladimir himself conducts two interviews a week, that is, in total, this is about 500-600 interviews over the years of work in the States. And then he was not ready for this format. Therefore, the skill of passing an interview had to be developed. When he improved his level, he was interviewed at Intuit. And even signed an offer for a position in Los Angeles. But at the same time, he had his last Senior Developer interview on LinkedIn, and it was also successful.

LinkedIn

Vladimir liked LinkedIn, he read their blog, looked at their open-source projects, he was drawn there. He went through the interview very well. Although there was one dangerous moment. He was asked what he likes to work with: Front-end or Back-end, and whether Full Stack can work. And he said that he doesn’t like working Full Stack and in general with Front-end, that he likes Back-end more. And for them it was like a red flag - an indicator that he did not want to change or try new things. And in most of their teams it would be necessary to do both the backend and something closer to the frontend.

But Vladimir was lucky. There was a team that was doing open-source, and they needed someone with experience on the backend. He got into a team that was not specifically engaged in the LinkedIn product (although he did the data structure for them as well), but open-source projects that the company published so that users from all over the world could use them.

Vladimir worked on LinkedIn for two and a half years. The company made him a green card. Launched the process three months after he was hired. It took 11 months, he paid for premium processing. After the green card, exactly 5 years later, he received US citizenship.

According to Vladimir, LinkedIn was “very cool.” It was also influenced by the fact that he joined the company just after the IPO (the first public sale of shares), so there were many energetic, talented people there, constant hackathons, interesting initiatives... He made many friends there. He still maintains some connections today, although 9 years have passed.

Go to Twitter

One of the top managers who worked with Vladimir on LinkedIn switched to Twitter, which at the time was in an IPO and was supposed to go public in a few years. And right after him, Vladimir's direct manager went there. The friendly team fell apart.

After some time, Vladimir asked his manager how he was doing on Twitter, if he liked everything. He said that the engineering culture there is completely different, that is, the scale and technical problems are more complex than at LinkedIn, and the internal databases and systems are very cool. And in general, tens of thousands of tweets per second, billions of users, hundreds of millions of active users - building an infrastructure for this is very cool. Vladimir caught fire. In addition, most of his team has already moved to Twitter.

He was assigned to a group of projects that belonged to a former LinkedIn executive who became Twitter's VP. This top manager himself was from Ukraine, but Vladimir spoke to him only in English. IN Twitter Vladimir worked with a team of 16 people, and only he and one other specialist did not have a PhD. What he brought to the team was speed of development.

On Twitter, he liked that you can come up with an idea and launch it in a week or two and see how hundreds of millions of people react to this change. And I was also impressed by the engineering culture and the level of colleagues. For three and a half years there have been different projects. On average, people change projects every 2-3 years. How this process takes place depends on the particular company. So, on Twitter, it's enough to just talk to a new manager.

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Experience in a startup

Vladimir liked Twitter, but at some point a crisis began in the company: shares began to fall, many left. In addition, he already worked for a long time in one place (three and a half years) and studied less. So I thought it was worth trying to move to a startup that can quickly enter the market. He wanted to be able to show his knowledge, to make a contribution for the company to be successful.

That's how he came to Zenefits. They made HR systems for companies in which they could pay salaries, provide health insurance, and the like. This is a project that, in the two years since its founding, has gone through an incubator - their valuation has grown to 4,5 billion. There was a large staff of developers there. He developed extremely quickly, but the tasks that Vladimir performed did not correspond to his experience. The company stopped growing at some point. Due to a number of problems, he worked at Zenefits for four months, until the company started having big problems. He didn't like the atmosphere and what he was doing. And when he got interviewed at Google, he decided it was time to leave.

Google

Vladimir came to Google as Team Lead. He worked in Java, Spanner, F1, Boq, Mendel, but almost all technologies were used only within the company. He joined the Shopping Express team. This is something like Amazon, in fact a delivery system, a kind of startup inside Google. Came to the analytics team, where there were many databases, tools, so that the company could report: how much money they made, how many goods were sold, and so on. It was necessary for retailers, Google Executives and Google Shopping Express itself to optimize their business. But he was not interested in technical terms, so after a year of work, he changed the team. In the new place, the infrastructure was developed to store YouTube comments, Google Hangouts messages, Google+ posts and much more. Google is useful because in the company, if you want, you can get strong development. Vladimir used it.

Google cares about the psychological safety of people. They conducted more than one research on which teams are successful and which are not, what is needed for people and teams to function well, to be comfortable and to work quickly. But these were all non-technical stuff. And technically, Vladimir did not develop. The company has a lot of developers, strong and smart, but everything is done very scrupulously, the processes are slow. There is even greater internal competition: in order to get on a certain project, you must submit an application. Often there are too many of them in one place or they are not put in positions at all, but simply invite people from other teams by acquaintance, the developer says.

Because of this, according to Vladimir, his contribution was small. He didn't want to work in a team or a company just for money, but wanted to get new experience, pleasure from communicating with other people, from learning. In Google, and on the first, on the second project, he did not feel this, and this greatly demotivated him. Life is short enough, so he decided to change.

On Twitter again

A good friend from Twitter, his manager, wrote to Vladimir and suggested that Vladimir return to the company, even without an interview. He agreed and got into a project related to prother activity, but another one is Twitter Trends, which is responsible for the things users talk about most. Once upon a time it was a large system, which was handled by 15 specialists. But when he got there, there was only one person there who supported Twitter Trends. Therefore, the project did not bring much benefit. Vladimir was offered to “revive the system.”

He really enjoyed this assignment because it was difficult and had a lot of impact. The team has changed a lot, made the system successful, thanks to it, many millions of users come. Twitter began to put a lot of effort into it again. According to Vladimir, he was very pleased that recently even Trump wrote about Twitter Trends.

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At first, Vladimir worked on trends in the company, there was Team Lead. Then he moved on to another project - Twitter Explore. There were 20 specialists in the team; before Covid, he was Tech Lead there. But now I’ve just become a developer again at Trends. Why is that? When the team is large, the Tech Lead begins to do a significant part of the work that the manager must do. It also had writing code, and collaborating with other teams, and overseeing a lot of things. According to Vladimir, he does not like to spread himself thin, but strives to dig deep. Therefore, I did not feel that I was successful and felt burnt out. And with Covid, communication has become even more difficult. Therefore, he switched to trends and became an Individual Contributor to work with what he really liked - he took up algorithms, Event detection. Finds what's going on on Twitter that can be shown to users.

The company has now announced that it is possible not to return to work in the office, that is, it is allowed to work from home on a permanent basis. Vladimir, on the one hand, likes it, he can spend more time with his family and children, save an hour and a half, which he spent on the way to the office. On the other hand, according to him, there is not enough live communication with colleagues, when you can talk, brainstorm, learn something new, just have lunch with the team and discuss interesting things not related to work. He has a lot more time now and has indeed become a lot more productive in quarantine, but there are things that Vladimir misses. Therefore, in the future, he would like to work two days from the office, and three days from home.

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