CS371p Fall 2020 Blog
3 min readNov 1, 2020
- What did you do this past week? This past week, I’ve really kept myself busy. I have been working on a couple of my class projects and trying to catch up on missed lectures. I also worked 40 hours this week at my internship. We had our Q3 earnings report throughout the organization, and my team of six actually got mentioned by our CEO twice in the 4000-person meeting for the growth of our product which was very cool. We’ve been ramping up our customer count for a new product throughout the week, so we’ve been putting out fires that come along with scalability nightmares.
- What’s in your way? I suppose the only thing in my way is getting through this last month-and-a-half of classes until I graduate. I am hopeful to have something in writing about a job offer next week from my internship, but until then, it’s a little stressful thinking about what I’ll do after graduation.
- What will you do next week? I am actually leaving to a cabin vacation property in Oklahoma with my family for the week on Sunday. I’m a little worried about the WiFi situation there (we’re actually very excited about Elon’s StarLink), but I will have my car in case I need to leave early.
- If you read it, what did you think of Ethical CS? I have not read the Interface Segregation Principle yet.
- What was your experience of continuing to implement std::vector? I’ve enjoyed learning more about the implementation of std::vector. I have to be honest that I’m not a fan of C++. There is a lot of control in the language, but all these little rules are foreign to me. On the bright side, I’ve determined that I know to avoid job listings for C++.
- What made you happy this week? My internship manager of 2 years messaged me early Friday that they are officially posting a job req for me. Initially, she did not receive headcount to hire me, but through a lengthy process of six approvals to the EVP level, a job req was created just for me. This is super exciting, but there are still a lot of unknowns in terms of pay, but I’m looking forward to negotiating the job offer. I’m actually hopeful that I will be brought in as a level 2 software engineer from some of the high-profile work I’ve done.
- What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week? (Over)Communication is key in a WFH environment. I’ve gotten to sit through both sides of the pandemic since I’ve interned at Proofpoint for two years. There are some people who at daily standup will respond to their ticket with something along the lines of “No blockers or unknowns”. That is fine, but I’ve found that responding concisely about anything that is abnormal or interesting benefits the whole team. I’ve also found my relationships with senior members/architects of the team growing because I will bring something up, and then they will follow up privately trying to understand more about the problem to gain a better wholistic understanding. Finding a way to grow relationships from a WFH environment, or in person, is important because these people will have input on your promotion cycle. Not only that, but when these people are pulled to other companies, they tend to pull away the best talent that they know with them, and that could be you.