I’ve been working at a small scheduling software company in the Seattle area for over 7 years, and am still making 85k a year with no raises in sight. I get emails from recruiters daily, and have had tons of interviews with some big companies (Google, Disney, Redfin, Groupon) and quite a few smaller ones. No matter how well I feel i did in these interviews I always promtly get rejected. If they give me feedback its always that “I seem a little on the junior side” which is rediculous since I’m almost 33 and have been in the industry for 12 years. Admittedly I get pretty nervous, but i feel like its hard to be confident when all you’ve tasted is rejection for the better part of the decade. Part of the problem is certainly my skillset. My company still loves it’s legacy PHP codebase, has chosen to use Angular instead of react, and still runs the bulk of its services on a monolithic server. I’ve spent the last 6 months studying like crazy, but I’m still getting rejected. I’ve been wondering if its time to just give up and go back to school. i feel like my AA in game design might be a bit of deterrant for employers. 16 year old me was an idiot and got a non-transferrable degree from Bellevue (Community) College, so I never got further than that. Much to my astonishment, I recently learned I could upgrade it to a BS in computer science at BC in a little over two years. my questions for you folks (tl;dr) 1. Have many of you landed jobs at big companies without BS degrees? 2. Think it would be a silly/bad idea to go back to school to get a proper comp-sci BS degree from Bellevue College? (sorry. first post on blind. good god i miss autocorrect)
Amazon and Microsoft too?
Rejection from Amazon. (That was before I started studying though and barely knew what a binary tree was though) haven’t tried MS, but most jobs seem like they’re looking for someone with C# .net experience
How long ago? I’m sure after your studying you could crack it. I wouldn’t think too much into MS C# .bet experience. Can’t imagine it’s a deal breaker for them
How's WLB at your current company? Are you learning anything new?
WLB is pretty great which is part of why I’ve been so complacent. I’m learned *some* new, but not enough. If I did everything my manager told me id be doing legacy PHP the rest of my life
Do free mock interviews to see where you stand, then practice on leetcode and do more mocks. Degreee won’t matter given that yiu some experience, go for big companies. All the best.
Sounds like they expect theory, system design and the like. A real CS degree will teach that better than leetcode.
I learned most of the stuff on the job. This is also one reason why new grades are not asked the system design questions, school doesn’t teach you those things well (at least not all school). But you are right about the theory part, which I think is not asked that often.