#134 How to get a FAANG Dev Job in your 40s with Coding Interview University creator John Washam
The freeCodeCamp Podcast
Quincy Larson
5.0 • 549 Ratings
🗓️ 26 July 2024
⏱️ 182 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews John Washam, a software engineer at Amazon. John's also creator of one of the most popular open source projects of all time, Coding Interview University.
This is John's first-ever podcast interview, and the first time he's told his story. Interviewing him was an absolute honor.
We talk about:
- How John delivered pizzas to save enough money to buy his first computer in the 90s. "I was tired of being a broke kid."
- John's first career in the US military, where he worked as a translator in South Korea
- How John crammed Computer Science for 8 months and taught himself enough theory and coding skills to get a job in big tech, then published Coding Interview University on GitHub
- What it's like to work as a senior developer at a big tech company, and what you can expect the journey to be like
Can you guess what song I'm playing on my bass during the intro? It's from a 1986 rock song.
Also, I want to thank the 9,779 kind people who support our charity each month, and who make this podcast possible. You can join them and support our mission at: https://www.freecodecamp.org/donate
Links we talk about during our conversation:
- Coding Interview University: https://github.com/jwasham/coding-interview-university
- The Starup Next Door, John's blog: https://startupnextdoor.com/
- Follow John on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnawasham/
- The Talent Code, the book John recommends: https://www.amazon.com/Talent-Code-Greatness-Born-Grown/dp/055380684X
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | And I thought that the talent you have is the talent you're born with, and that's all you've got, right? |
| 0:08.5 | So if as good as you are in high school, that's probably the best you're ever going to be. |
| 0:13.8 | And boy, that's dumb. Welcome back to the Freecoat Camp podcast. |
| 0:37.0 | I'm Quincy Larson, teacher and founder of Freakocamp.org. |
| 0:40.8 | Each week, we're bringing you insight from developers, founders, and ambitious people getting into tech. |
| 0:46.6 | This week, we're joined by John Washam, who's both a developer and a founder. |
| 0:52.1 | John is a software engineer at Amazon and creator of one of the most popular open source |
| 0:57.5 | projects of all time, coding interview university. |
| 1:02.1 | John, welcome to the Free Code Camp podcast. |
| 1:05.5 | Thank you, Quincy. |
| 1:06.5 | I'm so glad. |
| 1:07.7 | I'm honored to be here. |
| 1:09.3 | You are a leader in this space of learning to code. And it's just, yeah, I'm so glad. Like, I'm honored to be here. Like, you are, you're a leader in this, in this space of, like, learning to code. And it's just, yeah, I'm honored to be on. So thank you so much. Yeah. Well, I've learned so much from you over the years, just like reading your blog. And, of course, just going through the many, many resources through your open source projects. you've got like a kind of like a computer science flashcards project as well, |
| 1:30.7 | which we can talk about in a little bit. |
| 1:32.6 | And just like learning how you assimilated this massive corpus of knowledge |
| 1:37.3 | and went out there and, you know, went into the software engineer, |
| 1:43.5 | you know, Fang tier company interview process. |
| 1:48.6 | Yeah. |
| 1:49.6 | Yeah. |
| 1:49.9 | Well, let's, I mean, people probably have heard of coding interview university, but for people |
| 1:56.5 | who haven't, maybe you could talk just really quickly about what it is. |
| 2:00.5 | And we'll go into your story |
... |
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