Tag Archives: Work

Life after moving

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The Bay Bridge

The Bay Bridge

So I’ve been working in my new company, ezRez Software, for a few weeks now, and been in San Francisco for roughly a month. How do I feel about things? Well, they say that the grass is always greener on the other side. I do think that there is truth in here. I came to California expecting my life to have a significant upgrade, learn new things, make new friends, enjoy nice weather, etc. I now have to revise my expectations downwards a bit. While working at the new company is exciting, people are friendly, and I have a place close to work, there is a few things that disappointed me about moving here.

  • Weather is colder than I thought. Living in SF can get cold in the summer. While Toronto is currently experiencing a heat wave of ~100 degrees, SF is a cooler 50s-60s. This takes some getting used to. So much for hot California weather… maybe I was thinking of SoCal. 
  • Immigration here is difficult. The US makes it as hard for people to immigrate here as possible. Canadian credit doesn’t matter here, so I had to begin a new. Everything expensive requires your SSN and a security deposit if you don’t have credit. Also, since I’m on a TN visa, if my employment situation ever changes, I have to leave the country and apply for a new one. I also cannot apply for a green card while on a TN.
  • Cost of Living. SF must be the most expensive city in the US to live in. I thought Toronto was expensive, but California has the same tax rates, and some foods like cheese, are even more expensive. I don’t get it… aren’t a lot of foods produced in California? Why does it cost more here than in Canada? Rent prices in the city range from $1000 to $3000+ for a studio room. Yeah, there goes a significant portion of my paycheck…
  • Loneliness. I never thought about how lonely it would be here. No family and friends here. I always thought I could make new friends, but I miscalculated on how exactly I could do that. It’s always fun to go to new events and meet people, but you can’t exactly ask them to hang out with you after meeting them once. There are only a couple co-workers around my age, and I’m unsure of whether I can just ask them to hang out with me either. And being the shy guy I am, I’ve never considered going to bars or clubs to meet people…
So yeah. The working life… it seems depressing when you think that you’d be working and/or looking for work the rest of your life. Currently, I don’t have any social life due to just moving here, and so my life is just working right now. But I guess that’s what I signed up for when I moved here. Hopefully things will improve as time goes on. 

Status of my goals and end of undergrad

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Last year, I outlined a list of several goals that I had set for myself this year to achieve.

Let’s check back on the status of these goals now.

1) Graduate on time
I just finished writing my last exam today, and am confident of passing all my courses. As for my GPA, hopefully it will be improved.
Edit: Finished with a 2.75 GPA, achieving my goal of having my GPA >= 2.7!!

Status: Done

2)  Eliminate three quarters of my debt
If you take a look at my spending levels compared to last year:

Spending May 2009 - Sept 2010

Spending May 2009 - Sept 2010

Spending Sept 2010 - present

Spending Sept 2010 - present

Comparing the two, it’s easy to see that without a car or eating out everyday, I saved a lot of money. The increased tuition and fees in this period is because of full time school plus cost of attending conferences and events this year. I’m happy to say that I took a lot of money out of my stock account this year and paid down $14,400 of my debt, that’s 77%. So yes, I achieved this goal.
Status: Done

3) Secure a job by graduation time
After many interviews, I managed to get the job offer from the company I was interviewing with in San Francisco. What a relief for me! I’d like to thank everyone who supported me, including those who comment on my blog, my family, friends, my professor for my CSC490 CS Education course, my AIESEC VP of Communications and my  former manager from Environment Canada for serving as my references. I worked hard and I will continue that way.
Status: Done

So all of that is done and it feels rather surreal to me. Seems that college went by rather fast, a lot of all nighters, and maybe not enough socializing. Still, I think it helped me evolve as a person. Even this year, I am quite different than a year ago. I don’t have a car anymore, no steady source of income yet, no $20k in stocks, and no girlfriend once again. Yet I feel more mature somehow. Maybe cause I have tangible achievements now. Anyways, I thank the University of Toronto for causing me to become a stronger person, and feel quite relieved to end off my 17 years of education (since kindergarten). I still don’t know about grad school yet (GPA too low), but I am ready to move on to the real world now.

Life is stubborn, and so am I

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First off, happy Chinese New Years everyone, hope this year of the rabbit can bring some good food and spirits for those that are celebrating.
For me however, I had an interview with Amazon, and a good amount of snow and coldness (-10 C) here in Toronto; no celebrating since I live alone.

This would be my second interview with Amazon, it was at my campus instead of a phone interview this time. Unlike the first time, I prepared well, reviewed all my data structures (Trees, Graphs, Linked lists, Arrays, hash tables, stacks, queues, heaps) and algorithms (mergesort, quicksort, breadth first, depth first, in order, design patterns, singleton, factory, recursion, divide and conquer, dynamic programming), as well as large systems design (distributed systems, scalability and load balancing). The interviewer, instead of giving me several small questions, just threw a big technical question at me: code the placePiece method in a game of Reversi. The thing is not that I wasn’t able to do it – it just took a long time. The algorithm is to place the piece with given x and y coordinates in the matrix, check all 8 directions for a piece with a different color: if there is a piece with different color, pass in the direction and the piece, loop through it pushing all the nodes onto a stack/queue, and then if the same color piece is reached, pop all the nodes and color them the same color. O(n) complexity.
Thing is, I had to code this in about 30 minutes and wasn’t able to finish on time. He asked me to code using Java instead of pseudo code (which would have been faster). I don’t think it was fair; why give me one long algorithm question when he could ask me several smaller questions and learn more about my object oriented and programming skills. All this shows is how much I’m able to code in a period of time.

Anyways, I’m a bit annoyed because I prepared so much for this interview and only got one question asked of me. I know a lot of people wished me good luck this time – I personally believe luck is a combination of preparation and opportunity. The really sad thing is, I did prepare and I did make use of all my opportunities. I should have done well, except I wasn’t expecting him to ask one big question. And I don’t think I could have improved on my time unless I specifically knew what question he was going to ask. I don’t know what I did wrong besides running out of time. I was about 75% done the code, I kept asking him for clarity, I gave him feedback on my thoughts as I coded, I explained how my background working with distributed systems at the government was a good fit for Amazon, I asked the recruiter good questions, I even wore an Amazon T-shirt to the interview! And I couldn’t advance past the first round.

Some part of me thinks that life purposely makes things hard for me. Looking back, there’s very few situations in which things actually went the way I wanted to. I had three goals this year: to do well in school and graduate, pay off my debt, and find an IT job in the U.S, and it’s almost as if life is telling me that the third and hardest goal shouldn’t be achieved early. It’s making me work really hard for it. Even my second goal has issues. To pay off my debt, I need to get my money out of the stock market, and get my scammed money back from my Mastercard. The Dow is over 12,000. My stocks went the opposite direction; so much for that one. As for the second one, here’s the story. I wanted to build a web application back in June 2010, and this merchant from a forum I visited asked to do it for $2200. I foolishly trusted him and gave him my money. Couple months later, he said he would do it in one week, and it still hasn’t been done so I asked for my money back. He didn’t give it back. I initiated a charge back through my credit card company. Then the merchant tells me that the chargeback has been done and shows me some Paypal screenshots to let me know the money was out of his account and would be in mine a couple days, then told me he needed an extra $1100 from me because I had charge backed some services he did provide, like hosting my site. I believed him and gave him another $1100. My Mastercard company later told me the merchant had fought back and provided documents as a rebuttal to my charge back. Since I basically lost all my money at this point, I fought back again with proof I sent him the payments for things he did provide me. Mastercard tells me it would be months before they could make a decision. Great, basically that $2200 is gone, at least its in limbo for a couple months.

Nevertheless, despite these setbacks, I will keep trying. I’m the kind of person who doesn’t give up easily, as I realize things often do not go my way. I still believe that if I keep trying, then maybe somewhere things will start to bend my direction. Who knows, I believe its always better to weigh the decision of trying and not trying. If you try and the worst case scenario is that you get rejected, then it’s the same as if you didn’t try; thus its always better to try. And I’ve always wanted to aim high rather than low; if you compare yourself to low people or think of the alternative to not achieving high, then the consequences I think are too scary for me. So life is difficult; that’s fine. I welcome that. With each failure, it only serves to strengthen my determination. I’ve never lowered my standards before, I’ve always wanted to aim near the top (but not the absolute top; 中庸之道) , and if I can’t get it, then I will keep trying until I do.