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by SwSwinger
1727 days ago
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I was 27, living in the Southern USA with a MS from a State University, feeling very similar to you. I decided to push through my comfortable malaise and got offers at early Amazon AWS & Facebook back in 2009. It changed my life trajectory completely. I worked a little bit harder but got exponentially better payoff and interesting problems. Recommendations: 1. Getting into a more prestigious company is likely your next step. You only need to stay there 2-4 years but, since colleges are more corrupt, it's really the modern grad degree that proves your worth. FAANG or a reputable startup is your best option (LinkedIn Top 50 or Breakout List). The crazy hours you hear about are more self-imposed than you think, not mandatory. 2. If FAANG isn't calling you back, this means that you likely weren't even close on the interviews (Medium to Strong - No Hire). The interview algorithms are a heavily game-ified system and these companies expect you to study and game them so hard that answering the questions are second nature. I used to resent this, then I realized that it's actually a really good way to filter a large group of people with less class bias. If anyone can pass but they have to create their own 2-4 month gradual study plan to ace it, who is competent enough to pull that off? Often, in a larger org, you are encouraged to ignore your instincts and game-ify on arbitrary metrics to achieve larger-multistage company goals anyways. Adjusting my mindset this way helped me get the fortitude I needed to be better here. 3. Coding Competitions are another good way to get noticed by companies. The existing algo interviews started as NP-complete puzzles and Coding competitions and many people came to Facebook from that route (https://github.com/robertdimarco/puzzles/tree/master/faceboo...). Kaggle is the new equivalent for ML. It's a great time to get into ML via a non-traditional route and will likely turn into the existing algo interview frustration as it matures. |
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Me not being an American and not being physically present in the USA complicates things.
My understanding is that, because the US visa situation is the way it is (due to historical reasons), unless I'm an extraordinary candidate (I'm not) I'm not going to get a callback from any of their US offices. So these days I don't even bother applying to their US offices.
Anyway, as long as it's FAANG, it doesn't matter too much to me where it's located at.
Some of those FAANG and similar companies have offices in India, but AFAIK their focus in India isn't as much on engineering as compared to their US offices (I could be wrong here). And besides, it's pretty hard to get into their Indian offices anyway.
The few callbacks and interviews that I did get from FAANG and similar companies were actually from their UK/European offices (and I messed them up).
Still, I'm not going to give up yet and would keep trying.