My Journal

Thanks to Google's AI search engine and wikipedia. Now I'm not confused and can steer clear of the annoying Norton's path.

Carbon Black

• 2002 founded by Bit9
• 2019 VMWare acquired CB
• 2023 Broadcom acquired VMWare

Norton Antivirus

• 1998 When Symantec Antivirus for Mac (SAM) was renamed Norton Antivirus (NAV) which was eponym of Peter Norton Computing which was acquired by Symantec in 1990.
• 2019 Broadcom acquired Enterprise Security Software Division of Symantec, and Symantec was itself renamed NortonLifeLock.
• 2022 NortonLifeLock merged with Avast and renamed Gen Digital Inc.

I filtered them from someone else's experience:

• Referrals aren’t everything. You actually have to be good too
• Projects and experience matter just as much as interview performance.
• Rejection is just redirection. I ended up landing a great data science internship role instead here which was a much better fit.
• Don’t pick Java for the coding round. It slows you down dramatically. Always pick Python!
• Actual practice some competitive programming before interviewing at FAANG. Use resources like NeetCode.io to truly gain a competitive edge in your big tech interviews
• be less attached to interview outcomes. I was so attached to the outcome that I slept very poorly the night before the interview and that wrecked my interview performance. This lesson was very good when I interviewed at Facebook later in the year where I did get accepted. After my second rejection from Google, I went 5 years in a row without experiencing a single job interview rejection.
• Maybe mobile development wasn’t my thing and I should pivot more towards data engineering.
• The grass isn’t always greener. Just because Airbnb stock dropped so much in 2021, that didn’t necessarily mean I was in a bad position
• Sometimes the interviewer fails you for reasons beyond your control and you need to take that signal and be grateful that you didn’t get hired at that company
• Job hopping is really good to grow your career early. It looks worse as you go from early career to mid career though!
• Not all companies value impact over tenure. Some companies prefer people to make less impact over a longer, more sustainable period of time. This was something that really nudged me in the direction of startups and initially put the idea of DataExpert.io into my mind!
• The entrepreneurship journey I am on is different but still really good. Not giving one organization so much power over my life is a good thing even if it comes with a different set of challenges.
• Interviewing out of FOMO can be a bad idea especially if your values do not actually align with the company
• Don’t let interview rustiness impact the interviews at the jobs you want most. I should have interviewed with some other companies before OpenAI to refine my pitch instead of going in cold after years of not interviewing at all.
• Don’t post April Fool’s jokes about joining a company that you’re currently in the interview process with; it might go extremely viral and hurt your chances!