How to get interviews as 0.5 YoE junior SWE during COVID?
Everything started when got PIPed and left my first full-time job at Amazon near the end of 2020. Reached out to 100+ employers and got only a few interviews of 6-7 initial phone screens, 3 technical phones and 2 virtual onsites. I defended myself from only having 0.5 YoE by telling them I need a different working culture, and they didn’t seem to question more on that. Some admitted that my problem solving is okay, but all of them still moved on with others (also from those who interviewed me for a senior role; yes, there is one recruiter who insisted on moving me into a senior position). Oh this sucks. I would need to see your opinions on better ways as a junior engineer (0 - 2 yoe) and a recent grad (less than 12 mo) to pass resume screenings and get interviewed. I do have ideas and practices to get connected with recruiters, which does not always help. If not passed (perhaps mostly automatic) screening, how could I defend myself from being less experienced? How does this become a barrier to survival, after even being chosen in a H1B lottery and just waiting for an H1B transfer to start a new job? Major: BE in CS; MS in DS YOE : 0.5 at work (1+ for coursework and technical events) TC: 112k at Amazon; no longer a big concern now, just a matter of H1B transfer #tech #pip #h1b #jobopening #career
Reach out to hiring managers on LinkedIn. Read their profile, know what problems they are trying so solve. Write a very short message and attach a PDF of your resume + how you can contribute to what they are doing. You might to improve your stalking skills to find out the pain points. I’d hire anyone that did that.
With a CS masters you should not be a jr engineer
In that sense, what level would I appear to be? And how about from the perspective of hiring manager?
Haven't heard of a new grad getting PIPed at AMZN before the 1 year mark... they almost always get a buffer unless doing something horribly wrong
I’ve seen it happen. Especially if they are the only newbie on the team and manager is under pressure to pip someone.
Wow seems horribly toxic
Dude, I feel your pain. I was piped and left amzn as a new grad one year in. Thankfully I don’t have visa issue so I took a few months off to recharge. Came back and busted my ass on LC and interviews; probably applied to over 2k applications over 4 months. Due to covid and EOY headcount issues, I had to delay my start date even further, but I ended up getting 4 offers at the beginning of this year and added a quarter more to my TC. Life outside of the pip factory is so much better, you’ll soon realize this too. Good luck on job searching cuz I know the junior market is absolutely dog shit now. Hang in there, you’ll eventually find something! DM me if I can help.
Within few months you got piped! Want to know more about it.
This is my first full-time job. In 2-4 months following onboarding, I was asked to build the entire ETL pipeline, integration test cloudformation stack, CI/CD pipeline from scratch and learn all of those by myself. But there was few docs for this in the team. I asked a lot of questions, and onboarding buddy helped in building some part of the pipeline. I was then silently put on a couching plan, accused of letting the onboarding buddy to intervene, and then given a Pivot entry doc, which listed everything terrible but concealed by the manager in weekly 1:1s.