So short background. I'm a self taught web developer who lucked into working at a friend's startup with practically no skills and only a couple basic CRUD to do style apps under my belt. I learned a lot, but never touched DSA. Did this for a couple years. Startup failed to get its last round of funding, and yep, I'm outta work.

My cousin works as a data engineer in a city a couple hundred miles north of me and wants me to get a software job so I can move up there and out of my parents place.

Most of the devs I've met from there are supportive of my journey, but emphasize I need to grind Leetcode. Only been doing that a couple weeks now.

My cousin called me and set up a call with a startup founder. I talked with him this morning and was very honest about my skills. He was also honest and said he needed somebody pretty comfortable with DSA as the application they work on is heavy utilizing ML.

He asked if I'd still like to do a Technical Interview and of course I said yes, making sure to emphasize I was probably going to perform poorly but was very thankful for the opportunity, and that I'd be treating this more as a practice mock interview. The founder was like "Well, at least you know your standing. And perhaps I can give you some pointers about how to proceed."

Super good stuff actually. I mean, obviously it'd be better if I actually was prepared, but I'll take what I can get in terms of feedback.

I'm nervous, I've never coded live and I can barely keep twosum in my head. Fuck. I'm about to waste this guy's time and will probably just look at his problem for two minutes, ask a few constraint or details questions and then just say, "Sorry...I don't even know which data structure to implement."

Anyways, I hate to be so defeatist about it, but I just know I haven't prepared enough. Oh well. Thanks for any sympathetic responses in advance.