There is a playbook that comes with job-hunting. I am supposed to network, send cold emails, tailor my resumes, leetcode, get LinkedIn premium, build and ship constantly. It made me start hating software engineering as a career path. Not to say that it was bad advice, it definitely works for most people. For me though, it started chipping away at my soul everytime I had to tailor my resume, or send a cold email on how I could ‘10x a B2B SAAS product’ if you just gave me the chance. I started questioning whether I even wanted a job in tech anymore. The longer I played by the book, the less I could see myself wanting this career at all.
I still don’t have my “dream job.” Maybe I never will, maybe the dream is always shifting anyway. But what I’ve learned in the past couple years is this: the only way I’ve been able to stay in love with tech is by doing things out of curiosity, not obligation.
And, out of curiosity, I was always asking myself what would happen if I just didn’t care, and went back to reading, talking and building things that felt real to me.
For me, that started with books. I’d always been a reader, it’s how best I can take in information. When I started my job hunt, I naively believed that reading long books, especially books outside of academics would be a waste of time. I would read material, yes. But it would be short blogs, for instance, on system design. This might’ve gotten me through system design interview rounds but at its core - it did nothing to make me a good software engineer. I would only start appreciating the intricacies and nuances behind architectural practices, when I sat down to read a system design book. It was later when I got a role that I could then see myself applying the very same architectures in my own code, and more importantly it gave me the desire to build better. This did more for me than the short blogs ever could - I just wished that I hadn’t let go of my habit of reading.
When I was job hunting, I kept chasing coffee chats and follow-ups just to get my foot in the door. I’d rattle off a rehearsed elevator pitch anytime I bumped into someone in my field, and honestly, most of the time it just felt like ticking a box. The only times it felt good, were when I came across someone’s work that really clicked with me. That’s when the conversations started to feel alive, when I’d get ideas and want to build on them. Having a common interest with the experts, researchers, and fellow students of a niche interest I had, made me feel so much more confident in striking up a conversation with them. I was networking without even realizing it.
Being introverted didn’t make the usual networking events any easier, so I started looking for other ways. Talking to friends, getting introduced to people with similar interests, joining small online groups. All of that was networking too, even if I didn’t recognize it at the time. One of my favorite communities that I’m part of, I found while at a hackathon. I was using a new tool for data visualization - Vizro, and wanted to post about my results somewhere. I discovered the Plotly Figure Friday community and shared my work there. A bunch of data scientists, and enthusiasts of the field, solved their own take on a new data visualization problem every week in this community. The feedback there was always generous: helpful and constructive without ever being harsh. I’ve been contributing whenever I can since then, and it’s been genuinely fun. Turns out, this was the kind of networking I could actually enjoy.
Another draining part of the job search was the Leetcode grind. After a while, the puzzles just started to feel like homework I was forcing myself to finish. It was fun at first, but I struggled to stay consistent because I couldn’t really connect the problems to anything in real life. Ironically, I’d find myself thinking about optimization when I was away from Leetcode. Patterns started popping up in my day-to-day instead. The NYT game Strands, for example, had me thinking about using a backtracking algorithm to check for unique paths in the grid. That led me to generate my own set of words, drop them onto a grid, run the algorithm, and end up with my very own Strands puzzle.
This journey has only reinforced that curiosity always gets the better of me. I don’t think I can follow a playbook without losing steam. In fact, I think those side quests have kept me sane and afloat. They might not land me a job, but they’re the reason I’ve stayed on the path at all.