Rocket Academy Q&A 10: Yong Jie Wong (Glints)

This week we got to host Yong Jie Wong, Co-Founder and Tech Lead at Glints. Yong Jie was the first engineer at Glints and helped scale the platform from 0 to millions of daily engagements. Yong Jie shares his programming and entrepreneurial journey since secondary school, tips about the coding interview process, and tips for succeeding as a career switcher. The Glints founding team initially just wanted to help their friends get internships. They solved their own problem, and became a job portal. They eventually realised recruiters want not just the portal but an end-to-end hiring solution, and Glints pivoted to charging by customer success, not by advertising on their job portal. When hiring engineers, Yong Jie looks for good soft skills and a beginner's mindset: "I may not know the answer but this is how I would find out". He is agnostic on tool set, and ultimately looking for problem solvers in the domain of software. Yong Jie recommends building a T-shaped skill set of breadth and depth, and constantly improving by talking to different team members and helping to solve their problems. The Glints interview process has 5 steps: 1) Phone screen (what are your goals and how does Glints align?) 2) "Who interview": Who are you, oldest experiences, first job, mistakes, priorities, strengths, weaknesses. 3) Take-home coding assessment representative for the job. 4) Take-home assessment review and technical probing (how would you scale? make production-ready? debug, architecture, security, etc?) 5) Culture. With regard to technical hygiene, Yong Jie looks out for 1) README documentation, 2) Commit message quality, 3) Commit decomposition quality, 4) Code readability, and 5) Meaningful variable names and comments. New engineers at Glints are onboarded gradually to gradually help them adapt to coding at Glints. For examples of scalability, Yong Jie recommends checking out highscalability.com and FANG engineering blogs for how advanced engineers tackle these problems. What are the limits of our code? 1 million transactions per second? 1 billion? Sometimes it's as simple as adding a database index. Other times it requires more creative thinking about batch processing or varying server numbers over the day. Yong Jie's main takeaway from his Master's in Entertainment Technology at CMU was "Yes And". "Yes And" comes from improvisation, and helps us build on ideas of teammates and come up with creative solutions. When planning one's career, think about Ikigai: 1) What are you good at? 2) What do you like doing? 3) What does the world need? and 4) What can you be paid for? Yong Jie recommends reading Common Cog blog by Cedric (https://commoncog.com/) . If I quit, how easy would it be to find a new job? Within companies, look for the job levelling system and try to always perform at the level above your current level. Overall advice: Have an open mind, constantly learn and explore, and have a beginner's mindset. Glints is one of the top recruiting platforms in Asia. If you're interested in working or chatting with Glints, give us a shout! Rocket Academy is an online coding bootcamp that trains software engineers and helps them get jobs in Singapore. Learn about coding careers and how you can make a career switch at https://rocketacademy.co ! Explore Rocket Academy's courses on our website: Coding Basics Course: https://rocketacademy.co/courses/basics Coding Bootcamp Course: https://rocketacademy.co/courses/bootcamp Rocket Academy FAQ: https://rocketacademy.co/faq Rocket Academy Blog: https://rocketacademy.co/blog Rocket Academy LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/school/rocketacademy Rocket Academy Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rocketacademy.co

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