Onsites Google 1x Amazon 1x Microsoft 1x Robinhood 1x Twitch 1x Salesforce 1x Databricks 1x App Lovin 1x Anyscale 1x Apple 1x Square 1x In 5 years of my career, I was rejected practically everywhere. I was accepted only to a couple companies, ScaleAI, Google, and a couple unicorn startups. Other companies like Stripe, Netflix, Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, Pinterest did not even pass my resume. If I can do it, you can too
What’s the secret sauce?
I was rejected by Dell and Wiley before being taken by Amazon. Go figure.
What did you end up doing differently to get in? Or are you saying it is a numbers game?
One thing I did differently that I ignored before was to understand problems type by type instead of jumping to many different kinds of problems. Set one week and solve only DPs. If you understand it, medium and hard difficulties feel very much the same.
Thank you. I like this roadmap which encourages the same idea of doing problems by type and that they should be learned in order: https://neetcode.io/roadmap
What are those unicorn startups?
When did you get in? The hiring bar really was lowered a few years ago for many companies. The bar seems much higher nowadays.
Got in post layoff so I think the bar was higher
Yeah, usually that’s how it works, the bar was high when you were hired and then lowered for all the chumps who came after you. Ffs 🤦♂️
When you say rejected… did they reject you post interview or you did not get a call back?
Overall it looks like you are trying to create a success story about yourself but not really. I would consider you an inspiration if you would have passed 50% of your interviews. Your luck and grunt work worked. You happened to know the questions google asked you otherwise it would have been another failure in the ever growing list of rejections. Also given you low success rate, it doesnt look like you are consistently intelligent but conditionally intelligent
I was laid off from a FAANG, top school graduate, but get lots of rejectios from some relevant roles as well. But when I see people in those teams and their backgrounds, I get surprised how they even got there. There are lots of ridiculous hidden factors (e.g. your CV is too strong for the role and scares the manager, your race, your look, location/city ...)
Assuming people are not qualified enough because of their background and at the same time "too strong for the role" because of top school graduates. I wouldn't want you on my team.
That’s easy. You simply got fucked by timing. If you a breathing pulse, most tech companies would have hired you in 2021. I got probably 3 different recruiter messages a day in 2021 and I didn’t do anything different on my profile. Fastforward to 2023 it’s crickets for weeks at a time, and no more FAANG reaching out. Now if you wanna get into anywhere you better be pretty top notch at your interview game
Microsoft rejects candidates?? I thought we hired everyone who can type
i’ve literally never made it past the resume screening for microsoft
Never got an interview even with referrals. Maybe it's very location dependent.
Well Lyft is imploding
What’s happening to Lyft?
No money