What's It Really Like To Intern At Google? (LIVE with a former Google software engineer intern)

Key Takeaways

oh really okay it's like okay everyone my name is YK and I'm your host at CS dojo and today we have our first live stream ever and we have a great guest with us today Ethan Chan say hi to everyone Ethan hello nice feature wall okay so Ethan is a recent graduate from UC San Diego which is University of California at San Diego with a computer science degree and he interned at Google in Mountain View California as well as Tokyo he also interned at a few other companies as a software engineer intern and he specializes in full stack development and today's format is gonna be first of all 30 minutes of interview where I'm gonna ask Ethan about things like how did he get started with programming and what was his job experience like at Google and what was his experience like as an intern there once he was there and was there anything he didn't like about working at Google and then we're gonna do a 15 minutes of life audience Q&A session so send questions in the chat box so ask you know Ethan or me anything you wanna ask in that session so let's get started Ethan how did you get started with programming in the first place yeah so how I got start with programming was I guess I did my first sort of real technical internship with a family friend and this family friend was starting the startup and he needed people to work on his job application so at the time I didn't actually know any programming so I basically spent one week before this internship I looked up some Java tutorials and I did all of them and I just started programming and along the way I ran into a lot of troubles like understanding different Javas constructs like oh how to use a loop or how to use if-then-else but then my boss basically helped me through the process because it was still a very small company so I got a really good sense of how everything worked and a lot of mentorship and I think it's an experience sorry you can't go ahead okay so you say you prepared for your first you know engineering job for a week and that was a that was a job we're used to Java do you think that one week was enough to prepare yourself for that so I think preparation is kind of like a difficult way a difficult thing to define because I think it was enough for that job but at the time of starting I felt like I was definitely not prepared there are so many things that I was just so overwhelmed but once I started doing it and once I started getting into the flow of doing my job I found that I was pretty much prepared so it's more about getting to a level where you can understand the language and then just starting it and diving right in okay sounds good so let's sort of type ahead and you know talk about what happened since then so after that you decided to have you know study computer science at UC at UC San Diego and then you had some experience you know doing more internships before working at Google I understand so yes stuff yeah so what was your experience like prior to working at Google right so that was very interesting because they got to work at a lot of different size companies the first one I worked out was this company in San Francisco and they were about I'd say 20 people at the time maybe 10 engineers so being there I learned a lot because I was treated like a full-time engineer and I got a lot of opportunity to have a bunch of ownership over the code but it was also really scary because I had never done about development and it was primarily a web development job so I had to learn a lot of new things on the job and it was a really good growing experience and other experiences include interning at a very small company that was only like three people big and then interning at like a more medium size company that was maybe 200 or 300 people okay that's perfect so you had a lot of you know experience working at different companies and then when you interviewed at Google what was your interview experience like there and what kind of you know what kinds of questions did they ask you all right so with Google a particular they tend to ask two types of overall questions one is algorithms and one is design so with algorithms they expect you to sort of solve this problem this input-output problem in an efficient manner and what they're looking for here is sort of your thought process as well so basically how you're reasoning about the problem what are your assumptions and how you go about making a solution to the problem whereas design is slightly different in that it still explores your reasoning and problem-solving but it expects you to make intelligent trade-offs so basically say I'm making a server do you want to optimize for like latency or throughput and basically testing on what considerations you're making design okay so I think for the algorithms part you know for for those who are not from there an example of an algorithm question with this I mean like you have a string or you have a list or you have an array and then you need to reverse it using some kind of function that's a very simple version of you know the kinds of questions that tend to ask that tend to be asked at Google right and I'm kind of curious about the design part because I feel like there aren't too many resources for preparing for that type of questions so how did you prepare for that part honestly it's pretty difficult I think the best way to prepare for is to do internships because internships are where you actually have to make those important design decisions so seeing those firsthand and even seeing other engineers doing those decisions will help you form an idea of what you should be choosing for in your design mm-hm okay and let's just go ahead you know to to like a later point in the timeline okay so after getting through that interview you started working in Monty be careful now correct right so what was your experience like there so my experience in Mountain View was that everyone there was super nice and it was just a really nice environment to work in lots of great perks a really good like sense of interior design and just a really nice aura but it was a really huge campus it was even bigger than my college UCSD so it was pretty intimidating but the team there was really nice because basically even though there's a lot of people your team is still pretty small so you still get that sense of working together in a small community nice and what were you working on there so there I was working on an aspect of Google opinion rewards so they basically send out surveys and you get some money for doing these surveys and my job was to make a piece of technology that would render the cards in Google now into HTML so they could be displayed inside the surveys you say cars in Google now yes Google now so it used to be called you but now it's like called the feed or something but basically there are these material design cards that have like the weather or some news and then you want to render them into HTML so that are compatible with other display formats okay sounds good and after that you started I guess maybe one or two years later you started working at Google in Tokyo yeah what was your experience there and how did that compare to your experience in Mountain View right so my experience in Tokyo was pretty similar to mountain view in terms of the overall vibe that I got the food was much better than I'll give them that but everyone there spoke English so it was really nice and I think the major difference is the team that I was with because on Mountain View I was on this team that was focused on engineering and quality but in Tokyo I was on a research team so I primarily did very experimental stuff okay and was there anything interesting your experience in Tokyo like due to cultural differences because you grew up in California crap right yeah yes so that was a very interesting experience and I think the first time I went to Tokyo was before interning there but at that time I got a lot of culture shock because everyone there is super polite unlike an America where sometimes people can be kind of rude and there's no tipping which was very kind of off-putting at first but it was a really nice feature of Japan that I enjoy now and the public transit there is actually really really good so I am very pleasantly surprised about that probably the most well I guess embarrassing thing though is that they use honorifics in Japan so they use like Shawn or John or whatever sama and they basically append these phrases to the end of your name to indicates your status yes oh yeah so you know I'm Japanese and I like as some of you don't and so Sun and Chiang is sort of like the word mister in English mm-hmm yes so basically normally I'd be called like you know Ethan Kanin English right but strangely enough like when you translated my name to Japanese it's ISA and Chan and then like the Chan is similar to the Chan suffix honorific and then the Sun is also similar to the Sun honorifics people got very confused when I introduced myself because I'd be introducing myself but using those honorific and it's kind of weird to do that to yourself right so three for yourself mr. Ethan yeah so I guess Ethan Chang like your whole name is sort of like mr. wizard e-exactly yeah and why did you choose a you know that the Tokyo campus to work at yes that's an excellent question and I really send this back to yes my experience here studying abroad because when I studied abroad there I was sort of trying it out and seeing if I liked Tokyo and it turns out that I really loved working there and living there because I did a little short internship there as well so that experience really convinced me that I want to work there and that's my major career goal is to work in Tokyo nice and so you know based on and the experience you had both in Monterey California and Tokyo was there anything that was surprising to you you know something that you expected would happen and you know didn't happen or vice versa right so I guess one thing I didn't really think about that much about it but when I went to Google to work I sort of felt like I was working a very small part of a very small part of a Billy Big Machine so a lot of the stuff that I was working out wouldn't really be seen and I kind of expected that but when I started actually working on it it really magnified it I realized how little my stuff would be seen by the average user so in that sense I'm kind of craving more of that feeling so that's why I'm still applying two stars for example but Google is still a really excellent place to work so I would like to apply there as well and hopefully get a return offer right yes that's good so actually and they I can't relate to that because the experience I had at Google when I was working you know at Google in Montreal was kind of similar because I was so what I was working on this tool that Google Chrome developers would use to develop Google Chrome okay so I was you know I felt like I was like pushing somebody else to you know push somebody else to like actually make a difference to you yeah exactly that's how I felt too yeah so I guess I you know that the positives were like the people there and the projects were kind of interesting but I guess you you you you'd be and I would like you'd be able to like have more impact and all the useless daiquiri right yeah that's how I feel exactly yeah I guess but you know that's something that's kind of common in large companies because you know there are so many people working there and so many projects to work on there all right okay so I think I'm gonna switch the gears a little bit here and I'm gonna talk about like how we got connected so you know when you messaged me I didn't know I didn't know you before and I get a lot of messages recently you know because my youtube channel started growing and it's nice but I get like too many messages basically to reply to everything but when I got your message I thought it was really you know well written and that's why I wanted to respond to you so I asked you like before the interview if it's okay for me to show your message to everyone and you said yes so I'm gonna show it to everyone here you know just part of it so you said something you know along the line so I'm looking for advice in my career and then you said I know this is a really long message so don't feel pressure to reply in some way or anything and then you said choosing work to work is a huge decision for me so I could use all the perspective I can get and what I found really nice about this message was the fact that we say you know so don't feel pressure to reply in some way or anything and I felt like I would sort of you know off the hook and I found it really nice because I felt like you sort of understood where I was you know not just where what you wanted to get from me so could you tell me or could you tell us about what you had in mind when you wrote that message oh yeah definitely so when you reach out to someone especially someone that you don't know and someone that's kind of relatively famous and you're kind of not relatively famous you have to realize that that other person has really no obligation to help you because you're like kind of asking them for this huge favor or maybe a small favor but they might not be getting anything in return so you have to kind of be respectful and mindful of their circumstances and you really want to give them an out to like make sure that feel comfortable with replying to you and they also feel comfortable not replying to you because you want to have the mindset that if they reply to you then great you get some really good advice and get some really nice help and if they don't then that's also good because then they don't have to feel pressured to so the golden rule here I guess is for me personally treat others how you would like to be treated so I'd like to treat other people in a very respectful manner because I would also like to be respected and that's generally a good rule to follow mm-hmm yeah I totally agree with that and I think when I was younger I didn't really get it like I like in my personal you know communications as well as my like business communications I would like to talk about what I want instead of what what the other person want and I think it's it's really - like it's really important to keep in mind what the other people want - so I I feel like it's rare for someone to have that kind of you know sense of empathy I guess could you you know elaborate on like how you develop that sense of empathy yeah so I guess that sense of empathy really just comes from practice because you can't develop empathy just by interacting with yourself empathy my definition is sort of understanding where the other person comes from so just having lots of interactions with other people and then sort of I guess experimenting with how you talk to them so find maybe that if you talk in this nice manner then they'll get more responsive to you or be more familiar to you and maybe it'll be a little bit stricter then they'll like be more serious about it but they regard your problem more seriously and it's just about us just feeling out who your persona is and then how you can sort of match the other person to communicate in the way that best facilitates conversation right and was there any time when use that sort of skill to actually you know get a job or get something in your career yes definitely I used that pretty much in every single job application idea so especially when I'm trying to negotiate for something so one a recent example is there's this company that I was applying for and they said that oh the deadlines gonna be in four days and I couldn't wait that short because I had some other deadlines I'd be really far out and somehow that didn't even get back to me yet so instead of being like really angry at them and being like why don't you give me more time like kind of somewhat er coming from it was said to myself they probably really need to hire someone for this position and they probably think that I'm a very good candidate so I'll try to be reasonable with them and say that I'm really committed to completing my job search is there any way we can meet our make our timelines to fit each other and have a mutual sort of win there and that's really important to have both sides win because when you try to achieve something it's always easier for the other person to think about themselves as well so it's good to have a sort of mutual feeling of we got something done and it's really good as opposed to just yourself or just the other person right so it's not it's not saying you know I want this so give me this or you know you want this so I'm just gonna give you this it's more about like you know I want this thing and you want this thing so let's figure out a way to like both for for both of us to get what we want right definitely yeah right so I guess you you know you sort of cultivated that scale like throughout university and throughout high school was there like anything you learned about you know communication or writing that was sort of surprising to you yeah so I guess even recently just now when I was talking to you like here for the first time when he told me that my communication skills were excellent and I made a really good impression on him I was surprised at that as well because at that point I wasn't really thinking too much about it I was just like it's so engrained in me that I should be nice and I should be the other person with respect so just seeing how big of an impact it does have on the other party is really just surprising to me so it's really important to be I guess communicating in a respectful way and also your tone can do a lot for the conversation so as I mentioned earlier if you're more serious the other party might like be more serious and that might be a negative thing but they'll also try to treat your problem with more respect and more seriousness so they might like pay more attention to it and try to get it done faster whereas if you're more lighthearted and use some smiley faces or something then everyone will be really happy and they might not be as serious but there'll be a really positive sort of vibe in the conversation mm-hmm nice so let's go back to you know our main topic here Google for Lydia yeah and when we talked about it like before this conversation you mentioned that there were a lot of good perks right could you tell us a little bit about that yes so one of the best pressure is probably the free food because I always have trouble deciding what to eat so the fact that they have like cafes everywhere is just really nice for me because I can be like oh I want to eat here and it doesn't cost anything so I can just eat it so that's really nice and the other free perks that come with the job they are like really very light you get massages and you get some bikes and get internal like uber service there's a lot to talk about but I think overall it's just the sense of a company really cares for you is a big thing mm-hmm and when you compare your experience at Google you know both a mountain video in Tokyo and your experience at different companies because you know you you've worked at like a bunch of different companies what's like the biggest difference between those right biggest difference it's probably just the magnitude of what I'm working on so when I was looking at the smaller startups especially the smallest startup I got ownership of an entire project which was really scary for me especially at that stage where I didn't know much and if I worked at a midsize company I get ownership of a pretty big chunk of a pretty big project it wasn't really intimidating but I was also like something that was proud of as opposed to Google where the product I was working on was so so small and it felt kind of easy I guess at the same time I felt really stable and it wasn't asked challenging as what a blight but it was still nice fulfilling in a way because you're contributing to like it really big cause right so when you you know I understand that you recently graduated from university and you're in the process of like searching for jobs and trying to find what's right for you right how how do you think all of that experience will translate to your decisions you know going on like going forward did you like repeat the question so what do you mean about that like maybe in the future how what I'm doing now if I could I'm doing in the future maybe yeah I guess what I mean is I'm sort of like do you do you think based on your you know passive experience do you think you would have worked for a large you know larger company like Google or do you think you wanna have different kinds of experience from that I see that makes sense so I think for me personally I still haven't really worked out whether or not I want to work at a big company or a small company because there is a lot of trade-offs that come to each what I have learned though is what those trade-offs are so when you work for a bigger company you have more overall job stability and that's really important to me and you also have a lot of infrastructure so Google has some amazing internal tooling but I can't tell you about but it's really crazy it's really good and as opposed to small startups they usually use open source projects and have less amazing technology but you get to work on a lot bigger things with a lot bigger impact to individual people and that is also important to me and I still haven't sorted out whether or not one is more important than the other I think they're both very important things but it's a lot like up experience and a lot of data that I've gotten so it really helps me to think more deeply about my decision right so I remember you know when we were messaging each other you said something along the line of your your strategy is always to get as much data as possible and then make a decision yes tell us a little bit about that yes so that's actually something I kind of picked up from Google because Google is known for making these data driven decisions they always gather data and they always act on that data and it really helps me because I don't want my decisions to be emotionally charged too much I want to be mindful of like yes objective value of certain decisions and just gathering all of it you can let's you know what sort of doors each choice will open up for you and allows you to choose the one with the most value right so to me if I find it kind of interesting that you mentioned about how Google uses a lot of data to make a decisions yes I think it works in a lot of situations but at the same time I feel like sometimes they relied too much on data and they forget about like the people you know behind the data did you ever feel like that or is it just me I think that's also true because with the data there's also a story behind the data so even if you're looking at raw number maybe there's a reason for those numbers that you can't really quite connect this from look at them so it's always important to consider the use case and the user story behind it so one thing that a lot of companies do is that when they design certain features instead of just looking at data they'll look at data and design a user story for them which basically says as a user I want this functionality or as a user this should happen for me because I like using this app so it's important to consider both perspectives and just to weigh them equally and I guess weigh them with respect to how much you think they just happened back on your decision I guess right yeah I agree with that like I guess with my example when I work on my YouTube channel I like to look at you know the data like watch time or views or shares or whatever but what I don't get from data is you know actually what people are thinking and right can I get that like by you know message with people directly or like receiving emails or getting comments so I feel like the combination like having both quantitative and quality of data is important in a lot of you know different situations definitely yes yeah so do you have any advice you would give to someone who's just getting started with programming oh yeah so my biggest advice is it's not as scary as it seems because even though there's a lot to learn so for example when I was first learning Java I saw like the function the smallest hello world function I was a public static void main string args and I was like what is this black magic incantation right but even though it's really scary it's not as hard as it seems it just seems hard so easiest way to get a programming and to start priming is to just do it just don't be afraid and do it and the way the way I usually real proficiency is to do side projects so like basically build something useful for me and what should you do for a side project is a lot of is the question that I get a lot because a lot of people don't have side projects and they don't really know what to do and my answer to them is so just scratch your own itch they basically find something you're dissatisfied with in your life or in your like technological life I guess and build an app for it or build some tool for it so for example I built a tool that automatically themes like computer because I really like to customize how much Peter looks but I was really tired of manually inputting values everywhere so I built a tool to do that for me and that really helps me get more experience right so when I built that two-digit eventually release it to the Internet or was it just for yourself yes I did so at first it was just for myself but then I realized that oh maybe some people have the same problem as me so I decided to basically clean up my code a bit add some documentation and leads to the world and then what was the reaction like when you released it the reaction was actually a lot bigger than I imagined because there's actually an entire community of people that really liked the immediate computer so realizing this I showed my application to them and they are like wow this is really cool and it's a really nice feeling knowing that someone a concrete person out there is using what you wrote and it was really happy with it because it makes you feel like oh I've done something really good for the world and that someone's really happy with what I've worked really hard for yeah that's really cool so I recently heard someone saying something you know something like if you want to start a business or you like if you want to do some kind of project that's got to be useful for other people make something that's useful for you because it's like really hard to guess like what other people want well you know it's easy to know what you want the chances are if you want that thing other people want that thing too right that's totally correct yeah so I think this the next question is gonna be maybe my last question so I heard that you started a master's program after your bachelor's degree but decided not to continue could you tell us about you know that and why you decided to do that yeah so the reason why I started the master's program there's a number of different reasons one of them was obviously that I was interested in learning more about computer science but probably the bigger reason behind that was because I could only interact cool Tokyo if I did the masters because the internship requires that I go back to school afterwards and I was graduating so it seemed like a good choice just to try the masters and also do the Google Tokyo internship in the process but once I started the masters I quickly found that I wasn't really something that was helping me because it was very heavy on reading scientific research papers and discussing research but the things that I thought about this process was one I can do this on my own because the papers are out there for free and I can read them on my own time and two it's not really something I'm passionate about because I guess I haven't really found a specific area of computer science that I'm really really passionate about so I kind of spread myself thin and looked for things to be passionate about but I found that I wasn't really resonating with me so I found that maybe what I am passionate about is building products and building things that people will find useful and helpful and so that's why I want to go to industry first because that will let me do what I'm passionate about and maybe find a secondary like intellectual passion right so you said you know the your program your master's program was it at UC San Diego mm-hm yes it was okay so do you think it was because of that particular program that you know it wasn't to use for is it because of like a master's program in general I think master's program in general they do focus more heavily on understanding academic literature and that's graduate school in general also is just sort of digesting literature and then sizing new ideas and spitting them out into new literature and that is interesting I recognize that's very important it's where we get basically all of our new technological advances but it's also something that I'm not particularly like super excited about because I'm more excited about building things so I think generally yes it will be pretty similar wherever you go but it does depend on the school little right so let's say someone you know he's watching this live stream and then they're about maybe about to finish their bachelor's program and they're thinking you know let's say they studied computer science or something and then they're thinking to them you know should I get a job after this or should I get a master's degree after this you know how would you like advise them to make a decision for that right so that's an interesting question I think my advice would be are you genuinely interested in like more academic progress like are you really intellectually interested in a certain very deep topic that you think would be hard to learn about yourself that would be easier to learn about in a sort of group environment and that is really what masters in I guess graduate school is for is developing a deep understanding of a very specific topic area and becoming in a research expert in it so if you want to do that and that's for you go for it but if you're more on the side of building things like me then I think maybe going for industry opportunities would be better first and keep in mind that neither decision is permanent so don't feel too stressed about deciding because if you decide to take a job first then maybe along the way you'll be like I really like the specific field of computer science and then odds are if you work at a really big company or really come a company that really cares about your intellectual growth they might just pay for your degree so that's an even bigger plus than if you just started a master's by yourself mm-hmm that's awesome so gathering more data then right for sure yeah ok so that's pretty much all the questions I had for Ethan after this we're gonna do a live audience Q&A with you know everyone who's here so start submitting your questions via leave by al via live chat and then you can ask Ethan or me about anything you know you have in mind and then if you want to say hi to Ethan you can check out his social links on github IRC and so on and then I'm going to put all that beautiful in the description below as well and if you want to get notified about you know my future live streams the best way to do that is by liking and following CS dojos Facebook prays sorry so for that just search for CH dojo on Facebook and then find that bridge so let's do life audience Q&A alright so one question I see immediately off the bat is from Omar and he asked what advice do you have for getting a return offer from Google after an internship and I think my advice for that is to really be proactive about it so I just really be proactive in your learning and be proactive in your tasks so when I was interning at Mountain View and at Tokyo I would constantly be absolutely mentor what can I do what's the next big step and like sort of asking guiding questions that will allow me to efficiently do the next part of my project in a very efficient manner and that's important because your performance on your project is probably the primary aspect of whether or not you get hired back so just being proactive and making sure you've done all that you can to ensure your success is just what I do so Google is kind of an interesting place when it comes to getting a return offer after an internship because it's a combination of you know the feedback from the people you worked with and doing interviews with like other engineers right so you need to like do really well in your job and also do really well in your interviews so and that part is you know something you need to prepare for to write for sure a lot of people that when I was interning with they spent maybe the last two or so weeks preparing for interviews just doing a leak coded and stuff I personally don't like doing leak out that much and as a result of my interviews kind of suffered for it but in exchange I did really really good on my internship project so that decision sort of brought me out back and hopefully I'll get hired again I haven't really heard too much about it but I did pass hiring committee so it's a good sign nice oh so just just in case you guys are not from the ER Google makes a lot of hiring decisions with a committee and that committee is called hiring committee okay let's see only other slot of questions yeah actually an interesting one for you Ethan okay ensures Ethan does Google does Google overwork you like Google definitely does not overwork you they're very respectful of work-life balance and so what my typical day would look like sometimes is I come in at like 11:00 a.m. and then leave I like maybe 5:00 p.m. so that's like not even working an eight-hour day but what really matters is the amount of throughput you guess so even if you only work maybe like two or three hours in the entire day if you work if you do eight hours worth of work then it's really good and actually to be honest when I was in Japan I'd say half my day was spent playing Dance Dance Revolution or split tuna and then the other half was just actually doing work so but I still did a really good project so it depends on how good you work and how efficiently you work nice and so my experience wasn't that it isn't that extreme like I wasn't playing bass that's where I was working at Google but I see your point about like it's about the work that you get done you know instead of hours like I heard a lot of it you know a lot of things about Amazon being a really hard place to work at and you know giving you a lot of hours to work for but Google is definitely not like that okay so there's a quick question in Japanese it says you honed this method so let's do much stuck up so it's a it's a you know these are grew up in Japan so they III did grow up in Japan I was there until when I was 18 or so and then I came to North America how about you Ethan so I did not grow up in Japan at all I grew up in San Diego I spent probably like 80% of my life there but I've also spent a fair amount in Japan so I do understand some Japanese I can speak a little bit Scotia Tokyo and I said you kiddo and like yeah basically I studied abroad there for six months an inch in there so it's pretty to talk of my life but not the most okay and the other question they have is does GPA matter to be an intern at Google that is a good question and I'm not the best person to answer that because I have an anomalously high GPA because I spent a lot of time at school being serious so I can't really answer that question well but I've heard from other people that it matters but not to degree you think because if you can show that you're very hardworking and very open to learning new things then they will take you mm-hmm I'm kind of curious how did you get that high GPA um I guess it's just sort of in my nature it's the best way I can explain it because ever since I was in Middle School in high school I don stantly be a top performer in my class and that was this sort of a thing that came to me and was part of my personality I guess so it's kind of hard for me to describe exactly how but it's a combination of being surrounded by other smart people as well and having sort of the drive to succeed and the drive to better yourself nice and yousuf your senses hopefully I'm saying it correctly Ethan Chen how how to get an internship at Google so my path to getting interested like you go was actually quite long I started in my freshman year I applied and I thought I just got rejected and you know was counted moralizing for me I decided that I keep pressing on and keep trying to get this internship so in my second year at shot again and fails but basically what happened is that they said oh there's this other company that might want to take you so maybe you can do something internship there and get some experience so that's what I did and that was my first internship in college and doing that in itself I don't get a lot more experience and get that internship at Google and so how I ultimately got my first internship was through this thing called fubar which is I guess sort of secret but not really secret now program that Google does where we basically do probing questions and if you do well enough they get you an interview so doing that might be pretty good if you just Google like Google fubar then you can probably find some results about it yes that's funny because I heard about it and I heard that I think they stopped doing that for some reason like oh really yeah yeah I'm not sure if it's true like but what I heard is like it wasn't as effective as they wanted it to be right so what was that like um so doing Google fubar was much like doing like hacker ink problems or something basically they give you some problem and then you solve it and just do it for a few times until you get to some level so it was pretty straightforward nice cats Dee is asking do you wear that because your mask at work I do not so I actually got that ticket you mask I think from like a festival in Japan that I went to when I was studying abroad but I do have a lot of random like sort of anime stuff in my room so it's like a Mario thing there as well behind me right I'm sure you could see it but right actually uh we were you know talking earlier about how Ethan wants to get into Gambon so this game like a big part of your life it was definitely a huge part of my life because when I was raised my parents were actually huge video gamers so I think like legend has it that when I was being born my mom was holding a gameboy in her hand so basically what happened when I was growing up was I'd always ask my parents to Oh play Zelda or play some Mario so I can watch it and how I actually develop my reading skills was I built by reading these all the guidebook so there's this guide look for those all the ocarina of time that I was like really in love with and I read it from like covered cover like probably a hundred times and that was a really big inspiration for me because it was something that made me really profoundly happy and I want to replicate that experience for other people so that's why I'm considering game development as a possible future career goal nice this person I'm not sure like how to pronounce this name but he says what she says how old were you when you learn your first coding language how old was I let's let me think about that so that was basically a right before entering college so I think maybe 18 or something like that but I wasn't anything like super crazy early it was like more normal right yeah I think some people have this impression that like good programmers like have started programming when they were like 15 or something but that's not necessarily true okay inside the stream says tell us about the dark secret of Google Docs secret of Google then the dark secret is that I don't know they have good food I honestly there's no real dark secret it's just like they treat you really well you do some work for them and it's a really good environment to be in and they really don't do anything evil so yeah I agree with them Mohammad is sure I can't pronounce it says is you to me this source to learn new things what about the thinnest ice cores from udemy so I definitely have heard good things about you to me and it's a solid choice I personally have never used it that much I usually learn just by doing things so maybe investigating starting my own project and using online resources like tutorials or short bill documentation snippets so that's how I learned but you to me it's all choice I've heard people have successful bits okay and Zephyr is this how girls or social media ever distract so not gonna lie it there are some cute girls like Google but yeah that is a different story and social media I guess sometimes I work I do browse Facebook if I'm having down usually I am either working or explicitly not working here nice Cedric ding glass on says one is goal language um it's the language that Google made basically and they made it to be highly concurrent from what I can tell I don't know it myself but from the people that do use it they've said that it's really good for developing server applications right Angie willsez um are you graduated from an Ivy League college nope I don't think UCSD is considered Ivy League but it is considered one of the better CS schools right me neither I went to the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and it's definitely not Ivy League like it's it's considered one of the best in Canada but nah I don't think one I don't think it's one of the best in North America okay how was your first day at Google first day at Google that was pretty scary to be honest it was basically like it's as if you stuck a fire hose in your mouth and then someone just turned a full blast because there's so much information coming out at you that you don't want to do with it but basically you just kind of have to dive right in and over maybe a week or two you'll get used to it mm-hmm yeah my experience is kind of similar you know especially because I didn't study computer science I study statistics so it was pretty new for me I used bhardwaj says hacker on cork or Jeff for code forces which one for practice hmm so me personally I actually don't practice that much I just do projects and that experience helps me a lot right did I experience helped you with interviews too it did to some degree but I think probably for interview specific questions you want to go in doing some sort of practice like high rank or something I did a little bit of leak code but only a tiny tiny bit when it comes to interview questions for me what happens usually is that I wrote questions I haven't seen before and then I find out that maybe Lee code is not that useful unless you do like all the questions so for me when I practice is just getting proficiency with language and being fluent in it okay uh da volga de a-- says sorry like I feel like I just yeah I can't pronounce this I totally feel that yeah which programming language is easy and bests which programming language is easy and best I always trips it I always recommend the Python because Python has very like clean syntax and you can write a hello world in one mind so that's probably the easiest way to get started in my opinion okay where can we find your project that's another question right so my project um I think it was in one of the links but I can taste it in chat really quickly just one second so this is my profile crystal in chat and if you scroll down a little bit you see a section called projects and there's some projects there awesome and also just like get up in general yeah and then Derek Kong says I'm 15 how can I become a high paid Google employer-employee employee I guess yeah so I guess um the general advice I have for that is just to be dedicated be passionate and really push yourself to learn as much as you can have that sort of growth mindset where you want to learn more things another question this is what this one's for me hi okay I like a channel I like to record videos which he recorded but in Eric to help people could I you mean like translate my videos and then into Arabic just contact me at at my website CS dojo that I oh yeah and I think that YouTube has very good support for closed captioning so you can probably get in touch with YK and asked to do some stubs for Arabic okay Yusef your sentences what can I do to become a software engineering engineer I think honestly just practice and you know go to school and hit the books you know learn some code and do some projects and just be flexible and also do internships that's very important to do a lot of internships because I'll get you a lot of experience that you need mm-hmm yeah I did like one video about how I learned to code and you know I got a job as a software engineer it's basically a combination of like starting to learn something and then building projects and they're using that project to get some internship or experience and then using that experience to get jobs or more internship experience and so on okay so I think it's time thanks everyone for coming here you know thank you so much for tuning in yeah thanks thanks everyone and if you want to say hi to Ethan you know again we have like a bunch of links here and the description below and again if you want to get notified for future live streams just find see if there's a Facebook page this was actually um you know kind of hard for me I guess because this is a new experience for me but I enjoyed it and thanks for coming here to Ethan yep no problem it's my pleasure okay bye villain hi everyone