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by jhayward 2848 days ago
> FANGS have a pretty high operational bar that's sometimes hard to grasp from the outside, without internships, friends and networks of exposure.

Bingo. I think having an "inside" view of expectations is key to interviewing at these kinds of companies.
1 comments
amazonavocado 2848 days ago
Yeah, I truly agree with this. Couple the fact that I have a non-STEM degree and no internships. I picked up my first web dev jobs just from scouring Craigslist. Smaller companies that were open-minded enough to give a junior dev a shot. But I did stop using CL years ago and use better resources for job listings now.

So without any insider info on how big companies operate on a high level all the way down, outside of reading web articles or forum discussions, I have to put the pieces together on my own. My personal network is pretty diffused and fragmented, too. I know a person I met at a tech meetup years ago, he now works at Amazon. But he's too busy to reply and doesn't seem interested in being a referral.

As silly as it sounds I thought the small-to-big company would be the most logical career progression, as I even compare it to a music career at one point. In that you first have to produce and sell for an indie label before getting picked up by big shots such as Sony. But my reality is me spinning my wheels in the small co/startup circuit still waiting to "make it big".

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abeyer 2848 days ago
> I have a non-STEM degree and no internships. I picked up my first web dev jobs just from scouring Craigslist. Smaller companies that were open-minded enough to give a junior dev a shot.

Given that, are you sure you're 100% on the technical side of interviewing...particularly algorithmic type questions? Whether you agree with the approach or not, they tend to be more common and given more weight with bigger companies.

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amazonavocado 2848 days ago
Amazingly, the only company in the tech hubs that has given me any algorithmic questions is Amazon. But I am not deluded enough to say I am 100% doing well on the technical side.

All the other companies with some reasonable amount of public exposure, (like Zillow, Coinbase, ArenaNet, to give a few examples) interviewed me on more holistic and technical concepts, such as how would you use an API to build a website, or how would you design a database, etc.

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