The past two weeks I spent a fair amount of time preparing for interviews by practicing Leetcode questions curated by Neetcode. Quick intro: Neetcode is a ex-Google Sofware Engineer who is known for his YouTube channel where he explains hundreds of Leetcode problems. His videos enabled myself and my coworker to move from AT&T to big tech companies like Amazon and Google. Needless to say, his work has impacted the future career prospects of thousands, if not more, people. While practicing mock interviews with strangers on discord channels, I met someone from Indonesia who was also trying to break into big tech. They also landed a job at Amazon and moved from Indonesia to Ireland, thanks to the help of Neetcode and other online tech content creators.

The origin of NeetCode’s Youtube channel is not glamorous. He was a college graduate who wasn’t able to pass the rigorous software engineer interviews for tech companies, with tricky leetcode questions that required knowing how to use fancy-named computer algorithm techniques like “sliding window”, “depth first search”, and “dynamic programming”. As a result, there was a period of his life where he was not in education, employment, or training hence the Neet in the NeetCode). But he didn’t give up. Instead, he decided to solve LeetCode problems day by day and more importantly in terms of impact, post his solutions on YouTube. Over a year, he became much more skillful at tech interview questions until finally, he was able to pass the interview and get a job as a Software Engineer at Google!

But what happened next is even more interesting. After 1-2 years at Google, he got bored of the work there and decided to go into his YouTube channel full time. Now to many people, that decision might seem absurd. Why go through so much effort to get a job at Google, just to leave it a few years later before the 4-year stock vest even finished? But everyone is different and while one person might be motivated by money, another person might value autonomy or work life balance or something else more than money.

I bring this up because like Neetcode, I am planning to leave my big tech job soon. I am searching for new job opportunities. After working for two large Fortune 500 companies (AT&T and Amazon), I now want to try working at a startup. Where I can wear several different hats, learning various technologies, and deliver product features from 0 to 1. This is a big change, and I might be a NEET for a while like NeetCode. I am fortunate that I have enough savings where I don’t feel the need to take the first job offer I get, and instead I can take my time to choose a great fit.

I believe big changes are opportunities for growth. With this change comes time to reflect on what it is I want. I know that many startups don’t pay as much as big tech and don’t have the stability of big tech and that’s fine with me. What I want is to learn a lot, ship a lot, work with a lot of talented and motivated people, and be able to look back at this period of my life and think, “wow the code wasn’t always the cleanest, but man did I work on some interesting stuff”. That way, if I get older and then realize I don’t have the energy to continue in this fast paced startup learning and shipping environment, or if the seeking for purpose in life is better found elsewhere outside of work, then I can go back a stable large company knowing at least I gave the startup world a try and not feel FOMO.

Currently, the domain that interests me most is climate tech. I have been browsing the ClimateBase job board but haven’t applied in earnest yet. I’m not sure what it takes to work at these companies and want to do a bit more research before I apply. But I realize no one’s perfect and I need to tell them a story of what unique experiences I can bring to the table. And my motivation for all this sprung from a meeting last year with an art professor who is a good friend of mine. She told me about the 2023 IPCC Synthesis Report which summarizes the existing data on climate change and the risks it poses to life on Earth.

Since then, I have been watching Paul Beckwith’s Youtube Channel and learning more about the dangers of climate change, including extreme heat, drought, and flooding in different parts of the world. There have been times where I feel depressed by these news and I think the situation is hopeless. But I can’t just give up. I have to try to help. It’s part of what my family values and what I value from the heroes I read of when growing up.

My grandfather was a land surveyor who traveled to different provinces across China. One day he got sick while on a mountain and his coworker descended the mountain to find food and medicine for him. My grandfather was alone on the mountain for an entire day and he kept his will to live, and eventually his coworker came back with food and a farmer who assisted him down the mountain. In Chinese literature, one of the most famous novels is called Romance of the Three Kingdoms or in Chinese “三国演义” (prounced “San Guo Yan Yi” in pinyin). Here is a short excerpt from the novel about how the protagonist of the story, Liu Bei, gets a wake up call to opportunity

Liu Bei was twenty-eight when the outbreak of the
Yellow Scarves called for soldiers. The sight of the notice saddened him,
and he sighed as he read it.

Suddenly a rasping voice behind him cried, “Sir, why
sigh if you do nothing to help your country?”

The rasping voice comes from his future sworn-brother Zhang Fei, and then another sworn-brother Guan Yu. At Amazon, they would say Zhang Fei demonstrated “bias for action”. The main point of the story is that instead of being gloomy and despairing of the situation, these men chose to do something about the collapse of the Han Dynasty of ancient China. Liu Bei became a leader and eventually founded one of the three titular kingdoms of the novel.

It might be the day to day work of a Software Engineer at a climate tech startup is not going to be that glamorous or world changing. Writing and fixing React components or API routes. Figuring out how to inner join some complex geospatial data queries. Building data pipelines to clean large amounts of dirty data on the dirty pollutants. Maybe even prototyping LLMs and machine learning models just to impress investors and get some extra funding even if the application of such models are not feasible for the domain. Setting up CI/CD pipelines and build tools with no internal tooling from dedicated teams at Amazon. Hopping on a call to fix a bug in prod just before the beta launch of a new product. I accept all these problems, which seem trivial in comparison to the alternative that if we do nothing, climate change could make the planet uninhabitable for most life on Earth, including humans.

So to startups working to solve climate change, here’s my resume. I’ve worked with a lot of different programming languages but the one I am most familiar with right now is Python. But even more importantly is that I am interested to learning about your domain and how I can apply my software skills to help you solve your business problems, as long as those business problems are going to make an impact on reducing the adverse effects of cliamte change. You can email me at zishiwu123@gmail.com with the Subject “Climate Tech Job” and I will read it and reply. I will let you know if I think this would be a good fit for both of us.

Thanks for reading! Cheers to this year and may 2025 be a year of good impact!