[ranrotx]

The signal to noise ratio in the hiring process is horrible. I work at one of the FAANG companies and do a lot in the hiring process. I can tell you that getting a phone screen off of a resume that you submit is a crap-shoot. There are people applying to positions they aren’t qualified for, people applying to positions they have no idea what the role is (blast a bunch of resumes out and see what sticks), and genuinely qualified people who suck at writing a resume (and probably go unnoticed as a result). As a result, there are probably a lot of good candidates that don’t even get looked at because they are lost among the noise.

My best advice is find someone who can submit your resume as an internal referral. Those carry a lot more weight (at least where I work). However, make sure that person is someone you know and is comfortable “vouching” for you. These referrals are looked at more favorably since the thinking is that it’s somewhat of a known quantity.

[oldgeezr]

I can only speak from my experience with Amazon. I sent a resume in for a job at Lab126 since I'm an embedded guy with an EE background, no CS except 21 years doing embedded software. I never heard from Lab126, but the AWS team got back to me. After failing to pass all the test vectors of the coding test, they gave me a phone interview. I did OK at best. They flew me up for an interview and proceeded to ask me CS algorithm questions on a whiteboard for 6 hours. I didn't get the job(and probably would have turned it down otherwise, since it involved being on-call), but it surprised me that their screening process was so bad. Nowhere on my resume did I indicate having any knowledge of CS algorithms, yet it was seemingly vital for the role. Strangely enough, I did study up on virtualization implementations(KVM/Xen), but no one asked me a single question about that(despite it being listed as vital on the job description).