How to handle “startup discrimination” @ FAANG interviews
I’ve been sensing some interesting but strange rejection from some interviewers towards the work I’ve done at startups, not because it was not “the right solution” but mostly because it was not “large scale” or “high impact”, as in small startups you don’t really have to deal with very large systems, and usually you will deal with a few hundred or maybe a couple of thousand users (yeah not all startups are unicorns). I’ve spent the last 6 years in startups (before I was at a few large companies), so I usually tell stories about things I’ve done recently but after explicit or even derrogatory comments on how irrelevant that work/solution/architecture was, I always end up telling old stories about my previous corporate job. The problem is that +6 years is too much time in tech. Everything has changed a lot, so they end up critizing why did I used tech so old 🙄 Is there a trick I’m missing here? Has anyone experienced something like this too, or I’m just telling the stories in an unsexy way? I could lie and tell some cool semi-fiction stories with some cool tech I do know to operate (as a friend suggested), but I think it’s unethical and I just can’t do it. Maybe spending too much time in startups was a huge mistake if I wanted to get a FAANG job. Has happened in Interviews @ Amazon, Apple x2, Facebook x2, and has not happened at Google (yet). Rejected from all so far, except Google where I’m still waiting to schedule the on site. TC: 150k
Let me be frank, a startup engineer who HASN’T done large scale simply is not a proven quantity. If you want the large scale experience, you must go do it. Doesn’t have to be FAANG, can be anywhere. But, you have to prove it more if you’re not from big tech at your next interview.
The fact that you'd passed all these phone screens is already not a small feat. Do Grokking the system design book and you'll fly
I find grokking not enough
Def agree that it’s not enough ... maybe to form structure a bit but otherwise you gotta put your knowledge and “spin” on it
I’m not sure how small / no impact is the scenario your talking about but I spent 8 years doing mobile and some backend at a startup - growing with it from 10 to hundreds of clients and to millions of daily users - and got 0 faang pushback on the experience and what I’ve done On the contrary - many of the stories and the challenges (especially around scale , building a platform , scaling product both for end users count and for development scalability) were super relevant and encountered similar challenges (not always even in a bigger scale) at multiple places. G , fb and amzn (and couple of other companies) all gave thumbs up in that regard (g moved too slow , fb rejected - didn’t do that great on system) It’s either the way your telling the story or a big problem with what you worked in and managed to do (which assuming you didn’t just sit on your ass for 6 years - can still prob generate decent stories)
I think mobile is a good example where you can shine in either case. I’ve been working mostly on backend and a little ML, so they expect some cool large data pipelines, handling some distributed processing, or training some large models, but none has been really the case. Pretty reasonable but fast iteration with unsuccessful product market fit has lead to small architectures and simple models, which all have been received with an “ok” at best, irrelevant/uninteresting at worst.
Gotcha. I mainly worked on two successful backend services and one failed one The two successful ones were def some of the highlights of my stories. The failed one - no point to mention. Dunno - that’s my insight regardless.