I wrote my first assessment for a front-end developer role yesterday. Although I did not get the job, I have decided to share my experience and lessons from it.
Since I started my tech journey last year May, I have dreamt of my first tech role. I finally got an opportunity to interview for a job last week and fear and self-doubt got the best of me. I got the assessment from the hiring company on Friday with 12pm on Monday the 27th as the deadline to complete. I was so excited that finally I have the opportunity that I have been waiting for, my first front-end role! But I was also very scared. Every scenario played in my head; I had all the what-if moments lol. I decided I was going to use Friday and Saturday to prepare for the assessment and finally take it on Sunday evening but all I was really doing was stalling, at least I haven’t failed if I haven’t taken the test yet lol. Sunday night at around 10pm I finally opened the test and read the instructions. The test contained four different parts. The first test was on HTML5, the second was on CSS, SASS to be specific, the third was on JavaScript and the fourth test was on React. Mind you I did not know this before opening the test, all I expected was some questions on data structure and algorithm in JavaScript, so I was a bit relieved. The relief did not last though because my internet chose that moment to be bad. Did I mention that it was a timed assessment, so immediately I opened it, I had to complete the first part. As I struggled to complete the first test, the page kept throwing errors and asking me to reload. Every time I did, I lost the ones I had answered, and it restarts from the last saved point. All this while, the time kept counting down until the timer ran out before I could complete the first test. I decided to pause the test and complete it in the office on Monday. Monday also happened to be my birthday. I got to the office as early as 8am, looked for a quiet space opened my laptop to continue from where I stopped but that fear of “I could fail this” came over me again. I struggled through the CSS, then came the JavaScript. This part really broke my heart afterwards. The test was to write a function that takes in two arguments and generate 33 as the lucky number. I was given 9 minutes to complete it, but I panicked again and watched as the timer ran out, all the while thinking there goes my opportunity. Thinking about how easy this was and how much solving it would have boosted my chances of getting the job, I was embarrassed I could not solve it at that moment. After the JavaScript, I practically gave up and just let the timer run out in the React part of the test. I closed my laptop, packed my bag and headed back home thinking about what I could have done differently. That would have been my perfect birthday gift, but we go again!
One of the lessons I learnt from this experience is self-belief. Trust yourself, trust in your own ability to figure things out. The little you think you know could help you if only you can push away the self-doubt and believe in yourself. When I got back home, I solved the JavaScript script question under 2 minutes. I also learnt that the basics are very important. As a beginner, we tend to focus only on learning the complicated stuff and pay less attention to the less complicated things like how to write the <!DOCTYPE html> in HTML5.
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