A Classroom In An Office
Hello Friends!
I recently had a round of three consecutive interviews. I received the schedule beforehand and tried to guess, from their pictures, who would be the toughest. I was right. My second interviewer gave me the most complex case. It was one of those that are so hard you are not 100% sure what you are saying makes sense and you end up spewing out all the things you know about the subject. It was on those topics they cover towards the end of the class where I’m usually like, hmmm this is nice to know but I’m sure no one is going to be asking me this complicated stuff. So I hoped whatever methods I was coming up with made sense, only you can’t spew out just anything and leave it to interpretation - it’s maths so you are either saying rubbish or not.
However, as much as I don’t like technical interviews (only because I don’t like having to think on the spot - although I know it is inevitable sometimes), the most mathematically intense and challenging one turned out to be my best experience. Why? Because as hard as it was, I felt like I was in a classroom. My interviewer had that vibe you get from a good professor who’s teaching a very difficult class.
The conversation started out casually enough - we spoke about my flight and the fact that I was surprised that a 1hr30 flight turned into a 37 minute one. He then proceeded to explain to me how the airlines add some padding to the flight time, in addition to taxi and take off time. I wasn’t surprised at his explanation, because in his bio I saw that he had worked on airline optimization projects. The whole interview felt like I was a student with a teacher in a room. That’s what I liked about it. He saw every exchange as a teaching moment and if it had not been an interview, I could have spent the whole day there deepening my understanding of things I was only somewhat familiar with. He pushed me where necessary and encouraged me where necessary and challenged my conclusions or thought processes where necessary. I came out of it feeling like I had just come out of an interactive lecture, and not an interview. So, I got so much more out of it beyond my anxiety of how well I did.
My overall reaction has really surprised me because in the past, this would’ve been my least favourite interview; it really pushed me to think as opposed to successfully free styling my way through. I used to hate interviews where I hadn’t delivered perfect answers, as I believed that ‘perfection’ gets people in the door. But now, I can see beyond the fact that I didn’t know all the answers and appreciate the learning opportunity for what it was. Perhaps the fact that I may have been doing more learning than displaying my skills may work against me. Perhaps they may work in my favour. Perhaps I am underestimating the power of my long-term memory and all I spewed out wasn’t total nonsense. I don’t know, but none of that is really relevant because I’ve taken something from the experience and I’m able to appreciate it for what it was - a learning opportunity. Given the opportunity, this is the kind of person I’d be so happy to work with because I know every day will be a challenge and an opportunity to grow. (This is the point where I realise and accept that I like maths when it comes together to produce an applicable result; I just hate it when it is purely theoretical.)
The change in mindset is crucial to growth. It is good to move from worrying about all the things you don’t know to appreciating everything you are learning. One day, all the things you’ve learnt will be things you will be able to teach other people. If you are too busy worrying about the fact that you don’t know or there’s still more learning for you, you won’t be of use to any one.
It’s very freeing to have this attitude to life. The attitude that says - oh wow, this is something that I didn’t know or something I knew but only at a superficial level, here’s an opportunity to deepen or broaden my understanding. And once you have that attitude, everything changes. You doubt yourself and your abilities less because you know that you have the capability to learn more and expand on what you do know. Instead of feeling down you are excited about being built up.
That’s really the best approach to life. Focus on appreciating how each situation is helping you grow, even when you don’t like the way it makes you feel. There’s a level of humility that’s required in that process, because it is only the ego that will balk at the idea of “imperfection”.
To be honest, the perfection in this situation, is in the full appreciation of the exchange.
Who is your biggest challenger or teacher ? Are you able to see your interactions with them as growth opportunities ? Or do you find yourself stuck with the ideas of what you don’t know or things you are currently unable to do ? Take a step back and make the decision - do I want to be someone who sees gaps as further opportunities to leap forward? Or do I want to stay where I am, hoping that someday someone or something will build the bridge for me to cross that gap?
The choice is yours. And it’s all in your hands. Everything is in place for you to grab hold of every learning opportunity, ignore the irrelevant protests of your ego and take the giant leap to becoming someone who’s consistently learning, engaging and growing.
Love,
O.F.P
P.s
For anyone who is so inclined, it was a machine learning problem whose output fed into an optimization problem (which is usually the case) that required the use of random forests and non-linear programming. There were about 4000 decision variables so you definitely couldn’t use a polynomial regression model or something like that. The challenge then lies in the fact that the random forest doesn’t give a function that tells you how these variables interact. So you need to figure out how to optimize this non-linear objective, for which you have no function. I honestly didn’t have a single clue. You pick a random point and take tiny steps away from this point in all directions, seeing which gives the biggest change, essentially using single variable calculus to get the gradient. I can’t remember the exact name of the approximation. I think it’s perhaps a form of gradient descent? No idea, still need to read up on this. But yea it was very heavy on the maths. Having typed all that out I really have to admit to myself that I am a nerd and can no longer deny it.