How Sudoku helped me get my dream job

It was a month ago on the 15th of March 2021.
On that day I decided to quit my daily job as an entrepreneur for the last three years.

At first, I took a break from everything and just summarized my past, especially, the third year which included an unwanted guest called Coronavirus or COVID-19 if you insist. I thought about my way, how I was struggling with the fact that I have to lead new employees who I never met face-2-face, and how difficult it was to say goodbye to some of them.

Anyhow, my conclusion worth an article by itself, so let’s focus on the main topics which came right after those days.

Freedom sounds great right!?
Well, it does, but, not for the long-term.
After a week I realized I’m locked in my own home without having any outside activity! Yeh I know what you’re probably saying, and to be honest, you right, but try to place yourself in my shoes for a moment, I used to work from 8 AM till 12 AM every day for the last three years! So now you’re starting to get the full picture, I was driving nuts! The dissonance between what I did before and what I’m doing now was too big, therefore, I tried to feed the voice in my head telling me to do something.

And that my friends is the tipping point of my story.

1. At first, I bought a mandalas book (for relaxation) and it’s still laying down on my desk in my workroom (lol).
2. The second option was cooking, and, don’t get me wrong, I use to cook since I was nine years old and frankly, I do it as a hobby and not for living, so cooking all day long was too much.
3. Then, it was the turn of mobile apps, especially gaming apps. I’ve to be honest, I don’t play many games but it was a long shot I had to make.

I’ve tried many, from memory improvement gaming apps to logic and mathematical games.

Nothing was even close to the first time I did a full Sudoku session, well I did play some before, but now it was different.

First thing first, playing Sudoku on an app is way more convenient than on paper.

Second, the app I use learns the player level (based on the Sudoku board level and time-to-solve rate) and gives different levels every time.

Last but not least, as a retrospect insight, I found that in order to solve those boards I’ve learned how to become more consistent and methodical, and how to become more efficient in problem-solving.

I studied how to divide a big problem into small pieces and of course, it improved my memory.

Now, the funny thing was that I didn’t realize all of that when I played just for fun, but, after two weeks of playing (around 15–20 games) and when I was starting to seek a new job, I noticed that even though I wasn’t familiar with all the different interview questions, my way of thinking was different.

I thought about different possible solutions for each problem, skipped the native approach right ahead, and focus on the more robust approach earlier in the interview, that way I had more time for the “main dish”.

After that, in many interviews, the questions were in the field of dynamic programming and as I said earlier, dividing a problem into smaller chunks was naturally occurring for me 😅

The last part of most interviews was usually one of two options:

1. Another coding question, mainly dealing with data structures or recursive approaches a.k.a DFS/BFS/BTS.
2. An architecture/designing question, that expected you to see things in a comprehensive way and use quite a bit of other systems you designed or learned in the past.

That’s all folks,
sometimes in life, we get assistance from unexpected places and things we do or did.
Hope this article will open your mind to see things differently and maybe help you to find your desire career path.

BTW, my job title if you asked, is an infrastructure architect at a startup 🤟🏻