How many times did you get rejected (from onsite) before landing your first dream job?
Hi Blind,
This is nothing new. Rejections really hurt. I'm a CS Ph.D. with a focus on ML and DL with a good record of publications (though not in top conferences). I've done two internships, one at Apple. I've solved 250 LC (mostly hard medium) so far.
As of today I've had 9 onsite interviews (including FB, MSFT, Tiktok, Twitter, LinkedIn) and got rejected from 7 of them. One is still pending and the other one lead to an offer, which I declined because I wasn't happy about it. For some of these interviews, I can understand the reason behind the rejection -either my performance wasn't good or I got questions irrelevant to my background. But in a few of these, I did very well and still got rejected :( And I'm not even counting the interviews that didn't get to onsite.
For the ones I didn't have a good performance I usually do very well on all rounds, except one round where I get a really hard question. I usually make great progress in these questions. I do come up with a solution, but I usually run out of time till I can polish my code to be fully bug-free.
I really don't understand the expectations for these interviews. They expect you to solve a LC medium and hard in less than an hour. How is this possible unless you've memorized the question?? Is this because I haven't solved enough hard questions??? And how long does it take to get there? I've been preparing for months while working on my thesis and I feel like I got nowhere so far.
I'm the kind of person who always tells others to work harder instead of whining if you want to achieve something. But I'm really frustrated and I feel like I want to pull my hair out. Is this because the market is still not good? Or because I'm just stupid and I overestimate myself? Or both?
Can you please share how many times you got rejected till you landed your dream job (poll below)? It's becoming much harder for me to continue interviewing. Any advice is appreciated.
#interview #rejections #softwareengineer #coding #tech
comments
Do some LC contests and try to get top 1000 consistently. I’d say if you can get top 500 consistently then you probably can ace most interviews. Top 1000 youll still need luck to get in.
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Easiest entry point to a lot of top companies is through an internship while still a student. There's no on-site for internships, so if you get one and convert the answer is zero. That's the path for a large percentage of new grad hires.