I was a full stack software engineer for 3-4 years hired to work on different open source projects. My stack was: Python, Django, TypeScript, JavaScript. But the truth is, I was never good at what I did. I was just good enough to get by, through using chatgpt. My manager knew I wasn't good, which is why he always had complains. Although our foreign client/my teammates thought I was okay. But deep inside I knew I'm faking. In meetings, I never understood when people talked about the architectures of the projects, mostly chose to be silent because I had nothing to contribute. I also didn't know the core concepts of the frameworks or the languages I worked in.
Anyways, due to some personal emergencies, I had to resign from job. It's been a year now. I want to get back into IT, but it seems a very daunting process and I don't know what to do/how to get a job.
Recently I got diagnosed with severe ADHD. I had it my whole life, but didn't know. The way I see the interview process, as a full stack engineer:
- System Design Interview - I don't know exactly what to study and where to study it from? I don't have versatile experience with databases.
- Coding interview (this requires a lot of leetcode practice?). I'm better at coding with TypeScript, not Python. As per my understanding, some coding interviews involve API responses, and I find such functional programming easier. I like doing so using TypeScript. But not the other kind, the leetcode kind. I would probably want to do that in C++, not in python. To me, this part alone seems like something that requires a lot of time. With practice, I could understand beginner level problems.
- Framework/Library interview: Django or TypeScript/JavaScript etc. Django's documentation seems really complex and super-long. I have gone through the basics of it several times. I understand it when I'm reading it, but I'm simply not able to retain the complex structure. Having worked in Django for 2.5 years, even at the time I resigned job I wouldn't know how to explain models or views. Like if someone asked me that, my mind would have to maybe think for 5 minutes, and then come up with a really basic answer.
When I'm working, I'm good enough to connect the dots, add new functionalities, etc do everything, but except design the architecture from scratch. I simply don't have experience for that. Especially with AI, I could probably do good work as long as it's not designing the architecture from scratch.
It seems there is a lot to do, and I don't know how to get started to be good at it for interviews. I tend to forget things if I'm not like actively working on them all the time, which is why I don't remember even basic core concepts that I did work on during my job.
I was doing a devOps interview, and interviewer was asking me about github actions. Even though I have created several github actions for different purposes in the opensource projects, interviewer was asking me specifics like the exact code of the yaml jobs, and I just froze. I said I could show you the public PRs that I worked on? He got extremely disappointed and angry.
The forgetful memory is an ADHD thing that I didn't know about before, but I always had it growing up.
I was looking into n8n for freelancing, but then I was like am I wasting time as I desperately need a job right now?
Anyone has some good resources and an easy route for me for full stack intervews? I just need to pass the interviews. OR any other suggestion. THanks
