How to Get a Job in Databases

I really was just applying everywhere (but could not really find that many C positions) And then on that interview I just impressed the guy, explained some code as well, we had a 2nd interview where I just literally read 2 articles on db internals and was able to explain the structure that I just learned. I have a really decent mathematical education, I'm reasonably good even with some complicated C and they wanted some fresh blood.

• Keep trying over time to get directly into a team doing exactly what you want at the exact seniority you want. Eventually you may get lucky.

• Join a company that does what you want at your seniority in the area you already know. Attempt to switch teams progressively over time by doing work projects with them.

• Start a company doing what you want to do.

• Join a startup doing what you want to do.

• Join a company doing what you want to do on the team you want to do but take a pay cut/title cut.

Side projects can help you get jobs at early stage startups (like less than 30 people) but at bigger companies, in my experience, they don’t really care at all can help if a new grad to distinguish yourself

Family first. To a kid, the time you spend with them is much more valuable than any toys you bought them with money. Take care of your kid, your partner. Everything else is the second priority. You’ll level up anyway, just not in the way you maybe imagine? I got much tougher and more effective, also more caring myself (sleep). Also, a lot more frustration tolerant. This all translates to the workplace. On how some people manage to "have it all", look for the spouse who gave up their (often her) career to do the majority of the extra work a child brings. Respect to single parents, it must suck so much at least for the first couple years.

how do you even manage to spend time apart when you are doing working around 10 - 12 hours per day including life?

One thing I have found common when talking to a bunch of folks is there seems to be a lack of awareness around how broad distributed systems itself is. I have 6-7 years of experience, which is notably not a lot to give informed advice, but I have atleast started seeing through various stacks within dist systems itself. More specifically, I am starting to see the field from the following lenses:

Working on a team that uses distributed services as building blocks to solve higher-level/business problems. As an example, one of the initiatives I’ve worked in the past used multiple AWS services to create a stream processing solution for data ingestion and then async materialization of data. Even though it did not involve working on things like replication or query optimization, I’d still categorize it within distributed systems as we had to deeply think about the overall system converging to an eventually consistent state (among many other things). And that thought process can only be devised after knowing how those services work internally (like S3, DynamoDB, ledger databasea, etc)..

Working on a distributed services org, like Snowflake, Databricks, an AWS/GCP org etc. There are many lanes within these companies/orgs - at least at AWS, each individual service itself had 10+ teams. All these teams will be working on a specific distributed system problem. For example, I was in the control plane/storage plane team at DynamoDB where I learnt a lot about automated capacity/fleet management, scheduling, and partitioning. But I had almost little to no exposure or knowledge about how for example backup and recovery will work or BTree specific work. People often spend years if not a decade moving around 2-3 teams within such an org to get an overall expertise. This is at a tech stack lower than than point 1.

People working on teams/orgs similar to 2.), but the problems they tackle are niche/specialized like query optimization, network engineering, SRE, new replication protocol, compiler, pl etc. There’s often overlap between 2 and 3 at smaller orgs/startups, however I’ve particularly seen people working this deep into the stack to already have had a substantial amount of experience it.

I have spent most of my time around 2), a little around 1), and working towards getting to 3 by having some amazing mentors at work and ofcourse you all I feel like 3. is something that atleast for me would be easier to join as a new grad or perhaps after a PhD. Joining 3. in mid-career stage at 6-7 YOE seems really hard as most employers are looking for experience in those specific niche/specializations. Or I’d need to take a massive paycut or down-level even if they were to take me. (edited)

Agreed that a project is barely ever a requirement. But there’s an entire type of interview methodology that’s mainly trying to get the candidate to geek out about the domain they have an interest in. If you have a cool side project and it’s in your resume it gives a GREAT opener to steer the interview to something you know forward and backward and you can have a normal (fun!) conversation about the choices you made rather than just waiting to be grilled with questions. It proves you can learn something in depth and shows you can listen to the interviewers points and accept/respond to them from a place of problem solving. I’m convinced most people who got in with an "impressive side project" actually just had the opportunity to talk about what they were comfortable with with their interviewer. IME startups that need people to own something completely (as themselves or part of a team) and need a dev to have algorithmic/product/stack/self-management knowledge/communication skills semi-equally. Another place I’ve personally experienced it is two Fortune 500 companies. Both for early stage internal projects they were bringing new talent in for. IME startups that need people to own something completely (as themselves or part of a team) and need a dev to have algorithmic/product/stack/self-management knowledge/communication skills semi-equally. Another place I’ve personally experienced it is two Fortune 500 companies. Both for early stage internal projects they were bringing new talent in for. Tbf, I’ve had heavy whiteboard posturing interviews too, as well as the free-for-all panel interviews. Usually together for the same companies. I’m just saying if you put something like that on your resume you can use it to +1 your charisma and pr

When I was searching for a similar role, the advice I got here and also in Recurse Center community, from database developers and veterans was that to apply to Cloud / Infra roles and then transition within the company. Very few companies want to hire (or bet on) people with web dev experience for core database roles. The work is entirely different.

Another path was to take internship or join as a junior (at pay cut)

system design interviews vary so much from company to company that it’s hard to prepare for interviews change significantly from senior to staff, and become more domain-specific