directions unaware

Posted: November 1st, 2025 4:11 PM

tldr; be responsible for the suggestions, direction, counsel, critique, and feedback you give to someone who is clearly subordinate to you in seniority

Interviewing has always been incredibly nerve racking and anxiety inducing for me. I've found that despite my best efforts to prepare to be "on the spot" I usually come up short in actual execution. This definitely speaks to my inability to interview well more than it speaks to an interviewers inability to deal with this shortcoming (not that they should anyways). One of the first 'big break' interviews I had was at Franklin Covey for a Data Analyst Intern role.

The FTE on the team led the technical interview and it was honestly pretty simple. There were two queries that we were supposed to write in a Google Doc. The first was something to do with 'pull X columns, with Y filter, and only return B rows'. I asked some questions and then typed out an appropriate response. It was acceptable. The question completely stumped me. It was "using these three tables, get X data with Y filter, and only return B rows." If you've ever written SQL this is probably quite easy; you can already visualize what the query would kind of look like. So what stumped me? I didn't even know you could do multiple JOINs. I had been self teaching data analytics and doing a lot of reading. This was before AI was widely available, so I spent most of my time reading and watching every 101 and 102 SQL intro you could find. The interviewer got noticeably frustrated with me, he stopped the interview, said something about "measuring your heuristics" and then wrote the query talking about how 'n function' could be used to aggregate the data.

I was soul crushed to say the least. I told him I didn't realize you could actually do multiple JOINs. I was embarassed. Then I went back to my day-job handling an email security queue. Labeling hundreds of emails a day by clicking some keys on my keyboard. I was in a dark place at the time because I felt like I had completely misued the college opportunity to learn and grow. I had convinced myself that passion was something for everyone else except for me. I felt more lost than before and like I needed to apply to another university bachelors degree to learn this heuristic thing Zane talked about during the interview. I also felt like I was constantly behind in terms of knowledge. There was a piece of comparison poison where I was unkindly weighing my past and current state against someone with a massively different background and current state. However, there were others who were more or less in the same position I was in who knew so much more. How did I get here?

I think that pretty accurately depicts the feeling of being lost that I had at the time. What I wish Zane would have said was, "This is awkward for both of us. Look, I can't hire you but let me talk through the solution and you ask me questions if it doesn't make sense." Then maybe he'd give me a pep talk about learning more, trying harder, or reaching out for career guidance in a few months. Instead, I ended up doing some more self studying, stumbling through my job, getting a promotion out of sheer willpower, and then getting cat fished into joining Goldman, spending another two years stumbling through data videos and articles, eventually landing back in university. Through all of that experience there were even more interviews I failed, like the interview for Hudson River Trading where I literally typed 'sorry for wasting your time' in the editor before clicking submit when I had stared at this 'count how many of each letters appear in this array' question. Or when I completely guessed on the Google Youtube Analyst SQL question and confidently put down the wrong answer for another question. Or that time I opened the Cisco coding exam read the first problem that was about some kind of dual-list comparison, closed my laptop, and went for a walk. Or that other time I interviewed for the Tampa Bay Rays and got cut because my 'Baseball' card take home was so poorly done they couldn't understand what I had written or why it looked that way.

At each of these moments, there was (mostly) an opportunity for someone who knew more than me, was better equipped for raw decision navigation, and could make a well informed decision about what I should have been doing with my life. Instead, I was likely laughed at after the interview or in the case of most of those coding exams, confusedly stared at. So what?

From one side, this is in fact pure cope. Of course it is. From the other side, why wouldn't you take less than 1 minute to be a guiding hand in someones life?

I am disappointed in my inability to take full advantage of life changing opportunities while simultaneously never exercising maximum effort in making those dreams become reality. That statement can be true and not be completely orthogonal to the idea of having someone say, "Just go back to university", or "Did you even read X Y Z books?" Anything to provide a little course correction. I definitely realize how inept I was at the time and I've since spent months and years trying to undo that. A little help doesn't seem like too much to ask for.

Why is this not more common place and applied universally in everything we do? What is there to lose from the perspective of someone in a place of seniority or even 'more knowledge'?

I recently interviewed at Railway and had the best experience ever. The team there had put together a platform that allows candidates (and anyone who creates a Railway account) to handle support tickets. It is an experience to perform the day-to-day job, receive some kind of compensation (in the form of cash, since it's a bounty program), and better understand the trends and kinds of issues that users face. Candidates are asked to complete up to 5 bounties after the recruiter screen and prior to meeting the team. It takes the place of a technical interview with a mild Support focus. I ended up stumbling through the actual interview portion when asked questions like "How would you fix this?", "What would you change?". However, I was given some of that direction I had been craving the past 4 years.

"It seems you are underutilised where you are now." Finally. Someone who knows more than me about the general domain of where I work and where I want to go, who can provide a highly opinionated and informed perspective. This really got me thinking about what am I doing in my current role and what I wish I could be doing and how that gap can be closed.

What I've been doing since then is trying to diagnose where it is I want to go and how I want to get there. Currently, I think there is a lot of utility and power in focusing on a single tech stack. Personally, I want one that is cost efficient and universal enough to open plenty of future doors. I think the tech stack has to be simple enough to be effective, yet different enough to make it easier to learn other stacks. This will probably lead me to completely refactor the project I have been working on and continue to improve it so that it can be launched and used. Next, I need to read a lot more. I've found that I am not well spoken in terms of verbalizing my thoughts. I think this comes from a lack of written literature being often consumed by my brain. Recently I've been reading Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, Designing Data-Intensive Applications, Computer Systems: A Programmers Perspective, Software Engineering at Google, and Skiena's Algorithm Design book. This seems like a good spot to add better vocabulary, different perspective, and focused thinking to my current state. Couple that with building something I am actually excited about and it seems like that is a good way I can begin to really utilize myself before asking others to do so.

lesson

it's okay to not know what to do and to attempt to reason through decisions. don't do it alone. seek help from those who have done it before. find mentors everywhere.

being even a single step ahead of another makes you a potential influence in someone's fate. expand other's curiosity and offer opinionated and informed perspective when possible.