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Learning new Tools for Interviews?

Data Engineer at Financial Company profile pic
Data Engineer at Financial Company

I'm a Data Engineer. Within the data engineering realm, there are a lot of tools, just like in the software engineering realm. The modern data stack is pretty popular these days. It includes things like Spark for ETL at scale, Docker for virtualized environments, Airflow for orchestration, dbt (data build tool) for transformations in SQL, Fivetran for automated data connectors, Snowflake for data warehousing, and more.

I'm far from knowing all of these tools well, primarily because I use very few of them in my day job. The main reason I want to change jobs is because of this.

I'm worried I'm caught in a catch-22 situation where I don't know the tools so I can't get jobs that have them, which I guess is similar to the new-grad cold start problem.

My question is, how should I think about learning new tools for job interviews? My current instinct is to learn via failure. That is, I have almost all of the above tools on my resume. If someone asks me about them and I'm not able to give a good answer, I will learn that part about the tool so if I'm in the same situation I can answer properly.

Another approach I can think of is to do Udemy courses of them so I have a deeper understanding of how they work. I've learned to be wary of course not tied to projects, though, so I'm hesitant.

I guess I could do projects to learn more about them, but those take time and right now I'm focused on applying to jobs.

I imagine some answers might focus on what my current problem is: can I get interviews or am I failing interviews? I don't think my issue is with failing interviews right now, and certainly not because of specific knowledge people have called me out for for not knowing these tools. I think my issue is more with sourcing interviews currently.

If there's general advice regarding how to think about prepping for an interview when you only have some of the requirements on the Job Description, would love to hear that too.

Thanks!

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Posted a year ago
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3 Comments

What do post-grad job prospects look like?

Software Engineering Intern at Taro Community profile pic
Software Engineering Intern at Taro Community

I did a postmortem on my job search for a new grad 2025 role. As part of this effort, I compiled statistics on my job search. Specifically, how many resume screens I passed (call it the pass rate). More details can be found in the comment section.

My pass rate is around 7%, but a large part of it is from quant, and I think the fact that I interned at a small quant firm this summer skewed it. Putting all quant interviews, my rate is more like 5.8% on average. I ended up with 2 offers from high-growth unicorns. My first question is:

Is a 5.8% pass rate good for a new grad?

I’m wary of posting my resume online, but I’m happy to share it with Alex and Rahul and a few others privately if it makes things easier. The only things really noteworthy are T5 MS and T10 BS.

Rahul and Alex both mention that jobs aren’t one-way doors, but I feel that these stats reveal how difficult mobility is, thus jobs are becoming more like one-way doors with little to no exits, especially if you don’t have brands. From this experience, I worry that in the future, it’ll take months of prep and applying to only get a minuscule chance at moving to a better opportunity. I’m excited to be working at a unicorn, but I’m also worried about when I leave, it’ll be hard for me to find something better down the line.

It’s unfortunate that I graduated in a tough market, but I’m grateful that I got a decent job. How do position myself to have as many options as possible when I inevitably leave my first job?

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Posted a month ago
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5 Comments

Career Progression on Resume - How much to embellish?

Data Engineer at Taro Community profile pic
Data Engineer at Taro Community

I'm an engineer with about 4.5 years of experience. I've had 2 jobs since graduating university. The first was a small startup (<10 people) where I did backend engineering and worked like a dog. The second (and current) is a large (~1500 people) company that's far more chill.

I've heard, read, and generally understand that recruiters (and probably hiring managers as well) like to see career progression when reviewing resumes. Makes sense.

My questions are:

  1. rather than calling myself "Backend Engineer" for my first job on my resume, should I say I was a "Junior Backend Engineer"?

  2. for my current job, rather than calling myself a "Data Engineer", can I call myself "Senior Data Engineer"? My company isn't technically advanced to the point where they formally use the title "Senior" engineer for anyone (although engineers definitely are paid differently based on tenure, impact, negotiation skills). Hence I feel like I have that lee-way. Heck, it might even be better to arbitrarily take the 3 year block at the company and pick a point around the 2-year mark where I say I became "Senior", so I can have Junior -> Intermediate -> Senior on my resume.

There's irony in down-leveling myself for my first job, although I really was junior and titles are fungible. As for up-levelling myself in my current role, isn't the point of a resume just to get an interview? And are people really going to check with my employer and say "aha, caught you! you said you were a Senior Engineer, but really you were an Engineer!" and even if people do, I would imagine it's a small number, that's offset by the upside of demonstrating that progression, even if it is a little messaged'

Finally, to address a question that will probably be asked, I definitely feel like I have learned a good deal since I started 4.5 years ago, technically, but more importantly knowing what to work on. Prioritization, time management, etc.

Thanks!

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Posted 9 months ago
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2 Comments