Non Traditional Path to Google L5 SWE

I've been on blind for a little over a year now and with all the negativity, I wanted to (hopefully) share some positive encouragement for those looking to break into FAANG. As the title states, I had a very unconventional path to ending up at Google. My undergrad was in Physics. Sure we had to take Fortran and C++ as a part of the curriculum, but it was only 1 semester of each, and that was pretty much it for any type of programming. I think the most "complicated" program I made was one of our projects in C++ where we had to recreate the mod 16 algorithm credit cards use. So maybe 15-20 lines of code haha. After college I worked as a consulting engineer, where again, little to no programming was needed/used. I did become an excel whiz however. Surprisingly enough though, I did have to become proficient at networking, as the job required setting up and tearing down mobile command centers. But nothing that required knowing all the layers from the OSI model. I did this job for the better part of a decade and got fed up with the rat race. I heard about this "sexy" new job that was heavily in demand called data scientists. So I went for that. Maybe in another post I'll describe everything I did to switch into DS/ML, but for the sake of brevity, after about a year of courses and prepping, I switched from engineering to DS. I unfortunately got a role within a company that had no fudging clue on how to do DS, or anything digital for that matter. I'd spend maybe 30mins each day doing actual work related to my job, the rest of the time I dedicated to anything and everything else that interested me. I would literally take the courses on acloudguru to become a cloud architect. I was actually about to sit for the AWS solutions architect test before I got the Google offer. I was refactoring company projects from the enterprise level monolithic monstrosities they were, to micro services, which I had to learn Docker, Kubernetes, Load Balancing, SOLID design principles, scalable API etc. Not only that, I would rewrite everything in Golang and Scala. Going in depth with Golang really got me hooked on thread safe design and IPC (inter process communication). But honestly, I did it all for no other reason than I wanted to learn those languages and my team at the time refused to use anything but Python. I mean seriously, their "complicated queries" and data aggs would be comprised of SELECT * , dump the data in CSV and then process in Python. Whenever my manager would check in on my work, I'd just show him a bunch of Go code (which he had no clue what he was looking at), and he'd smile and say "looks good". Moments like that really put me in gear to get the fudge out of there. I realized my growth would be nothing more than exponentially negative if I stayed there. I started doing more distributed style projects surrounding byzantine problems and wrote blogs. I polished my github, I even built my own personal website from scratch (no frameworks) to show off everything I was doing. In between that, I was doing LC, at least 3 problems a day, on a slow day. I was doing everything to get recognized by any company other than the one I was with. All the worked paid off as I ended up getting interviews from Google, FB, Amazon, Disney, Wayfair, and a few other companies. The moment I got the FB and Google interviews, I told both recruiters I wanted about 6 months to prepare. From there I went H.A.M on LC, educative, and YouTube. while at the gym doing like 30-45mins on the treadmill, I'd watch mock system design interviews (like the full on 40+min long ones). I'd pick a topic I'd want to focus on in LC, and I would do that topic for 2-3 days straight to make sure I got the repetition in and picked up the patterns (5-8 problems a day). I'd read one of the System design sections a day from "Grokking the System Design Interview". I was hellbent on getting out of my company and going somewhere quality. The Google Interview - I told my recruiter to put me through the L4 loop which just consists of 4 technicals and a Googlyness interview. I can't discuss specifics of the questions, but there was definitely a design problem, a graph problem, and a dp problem. Not only did I end up crushing the interview and getting a greenlight from HC, but I was actually recommended to go through the L5 loop. I got the improbable "google uplevel". So I went back and did the L5 loop, and ultimately got L5. Today I feel more fulfilled than ever. I feel more paid than ever. And I feel, for the first time like I'm just scratching the surface of my potential, and I work for a company that will help me grow. I didn't come from some top CS school. I didn't have prestigious internships to throw on my resume. I didn't even go to a top tier undergrad school for physics. No one in my family ever went to college nor knew how to code, so I'm not some savant that just rain man-ed my way into google. I think what helped me the most was that I was truly interested in what I was doing/learning. blind tax 13 YOE $330k TC - LCOL Area