66 -> 90 -> 330 in 2 years after graduation, sharing struggles and positivity

#engineering #swe #meta #amazon #google I recently cleared multiple onsites with help from the Blind community. Wanted to share some positivity for fellow engineers and scientists. I won’t be sharing questions or specific interview tips here, but plz feel free to dm. Decided to join Meta as a E4 SWE, machine learning a few weeks back. Some background story. I went through a standard CS curriculum in undergrad, started focusing on deep learning and computer vision during my master. I love what I was studying, and was hoping to study more by getting into a solid PhD program. Got rejected by all 15 applications. I then decided to join a lab in my school as full-time RA to build up some experience and look for relevant positions in the industry. Managed to squeeze out a publication, but failed all of my tech interviews miserably. I later obtained a return offer from a small company I interned with. They did a bunch of interesting AI projects with the government but the pay wasn’t ideal obviously. My plan then was to aggressively take on projects for 2-3 years and strive for a somewhat R&D focused position at big techs. Recruiters started reaching out after 8 months, and I felt like that was the time. I quit all my leisure and hobbies for 1.5 months, finally landed some solid offers. Received Meta, Amazon, and Google (in this order) on the same day. Throughout the past few years, I made so many objectively bad decisions, failed countless interviews and applications, slacked off so many times when I should be working hard, and envied my friends who joined big techs directly after graduation with ~200k TC. But I have never regret a single decision I made, because I personally made those decisions with the limited information I had. I could only try to make the best out of the decisions. My undergrad commencement student speaker emphasized the importance of making good decisions everyday. I somewhat disagree. I guess what I wanted to say is please always respect the decisions you made, good or bad. There may be flaws, but staying positive and focusing on what you really like or considered important usually work out eventually. (This is the first time I share my thoughts of life in English. My wife was having so much fun at Nordstrom Rack’s 40% additional sale event and I was left sitting outside the fitting room for hours, hence this post. YOE: 2 TC: 330k