Nvidia offer eval (and novel)

tl;dr Been interviewing for 4 months, finally got a good offer. Old TC -> 134k Offer TC -> IC4 205/324/15 (Remote, Atlanta) -> 286kTC YOE 12 I'm going to accept, since this is top-of-band for IC4 outside of the Bay or NYC. Pushed for IC5 and was gently denied. The rest of my search is below. For people who are starting out or in the middle of a rough patch, just remember it is a numbers game once you get to a baseline level of LC and interview skills. Just keep going and you'll eventually find a good match. Application Rejected or No Reply: square, vmware, netflix, plaid, brex, twilio, twitter, roku, sonos, IBM, asana, robinhood, fortinet, color, latch, affirm, qualcomm, sifive, uber, coinbase, EA, hashicorp, airbnb, remitly, oracle, lyft, chime, arm, sound united, synopsys, snowflake, salesforce OA/Phone Screen Rejected: meta, amazon, github, anduril, dropbox, bird, nvidia (x1), cruise Pulled out after phone screen: keysight, okta Onsite Rejected: linkedin, microsoft (x2), stripe, google, arista networks Pulled out during onsites: samsara, nvidia (x1) Offer Declined: microsoft (downlevel to SDE2, lol), zscaler (refused to match nvidia) Offers: nvidia (ic4) Best Recruiter: Stripe - sharp, funny, on top of everything Honorable Mention: Nvidia - Didn't play games with my offer, told me top of band (that didn't need VP approval) for location Worst Recruiter(s): Microsoft - nothing in-house, they're all overworked Dishonorable Mention: Zscaler - fine until offer stage, then started playing games Best Interview Experience: Stripe (Tough but fair, not LC) Honorable Mention: Nvidia -> technical questions relevant to domain, minimal LC Worst Interview Experience(s): Amazon (stupid-hard phone screen) and Keysight (completely different job than what I applied to) Most interview rounds - Single position: Google -> 9 rounds just to reject me after down-level Most interview rounds - Multiple: Microsoft -> 19 rounds across 4 applications Dishonorable mention: Nvidia -> 17 rounds for 2 applications (not counting phone screen rejection) #swe