SDE1 to internship
YOE 4.5. Both at 200 person sized midwest tech companies, no names in generally, especially the tech industry. Gotten phone interview with google, onsite with fb, onsite with amazon, onsite with yelp. All rejected. Onsite still up for microsoft. Now I know I have improved at LC question. And prolly what helped me get from phone to onsite, and over time I feel I've gotten better with onsite. Answered well and correctly for yelp. But still rejected cuz my background wasnt a fit apparently. As if frameworks cant be mastered relatively quickly but I will admit the technologies that I want to use and develop in (that these faang companies use) are not used at my current company. I mean we dont even have to handle a lot of data really. We get to stand up clusters locally at partners. Im currently pursuing my masters at night and I'm wondering if it would be career suicide to do an internship at a FAANG. It just seems like expectations trying to get at these popular companies is so high, and I know I'm selling myself majorly short by doing an internship but shouldn't that open the door to me for position for them. In a much easier way then coming in from sde1 to sde1 or sde2. I mean I straight up had a headhunter said my companies on my resume is my weak point. Which I do feel like is taken into consideration. Should I just keep suffering and then maybe in a year or two my already 2 year journey of interviewing I will finally land one.
Do you have feedback from the interviews, if so work on it. Also, I would advise you try some companies which has smaller scale but still does similar work. I feel this route is better than internship route.
Yeah the latest one at yelp where I felt like I aced the interview said I was qualified and everything, they just went with someone more fit for the role and to try again.
What frameworks did they expect you to have experience with at Yelp? What Lvl were you interviewing for?
Yelp said they dont fundamentally believe in levels. So just there standard software developer position. It seems either pro at python or pro at massive data pipelines
Thanks, I'll be reading up on data pipelines (assuming stuff like ELK) before my interview.
I would say there's something missing in your interviews that isn't be uncovered or you haven't developed a strong enough skill for yet. I went from 2 yoe at a start-up (.5 of that was as an intern) to sde 2 at Amazon. I believe if you put in the extra effort the yoe doesn't really matter. If they do in the interview you're probably not going to enjoy the manager because they are too by the book in the sense they don't truly value skill only on paper With that said, I've seen people go back for their Masters and then pursue an internship, I wouldn't consider it career suicide. Keep pushing your masters, keep interviewing, worst case you get an internship that transitions to full-time after you complete your masters.
The start-up was ~40 people total, 13 engineers.
I'm not gunna lie prolly expend as much h extra effort as there is. Just did the major ones to early when first starting off with studying questions. Yelp was a shock tho. Definitely have the strong skills. I'm not trying to blow my own horn but my company knows all my current and past colleagues would recommend me. The lc questions are beginning to be the same so not hard to solve. I just dont have the resume of working python for 5 years or android or anything like. Lots of experience in angular and c#. Which isnt a huge market share