A Junior Developer's Bumpy Journey to Joining the Company

This introduces the journey of Alex, who joined CJ Olive Young as a backend developer on the Retail Platform Development Team. As motivations for applying, he cited the experience of working with the largest-scale O2O service in Korea, plans for modularizing and modernizing legacy systems, and the opportunity to experience large-scale traffic during Olive Young Sale periods.

He presents two stages as a strategy for growth. The first is creating an environment, where he rented a shared office to impose a sense of obligation and built an environment where studying through study groups became unavoidable. The second is growing in the wild, going through a process of objectively diagnosing his skill level through interviews and supplementing his weaknesses.

In particular, during interview preparation, he used ChatGPT by assigning it the role of interviewer, and honed his technical skills by conducting mock interviews using a prepared list of questions.