Ask HN: If not fresh out of college, what did you do to join a FAANG?

There are plenty of opportunities out there, with large corporations, that would allow you to grow as a developer, learning useful production skills as you go.

I didn't take the job. They did a geographical adjustment to the comp, and it was considerably less than I already made, and about half what levels.fyi had led me to expect.

I did what it said and got offers.

Now if it's reversing a binary tree (the famous interview question), if you don't love doing it, you won't love working with big data and complex systems.

As for me, I loved being there working for 1 feature for half year as much as I hated working at small companies where new features had to be implemented every day. I think the latter is just better match for you.

Friend with a FAANG started a bootcamp service and I was one of the first students. Algorithms and mock interviews for 6 months before I landed a FAANG role. It was a grind, but worth it in the end.

Interviewed at Google in 2015. I basically went through all the exercises in Cracking the Coding Interview, and spent a bunch of time relearning all the stuff in my Algorithms book that never really clicked when I was 20.

I probably spent a month study all told, and I passed the interview to get hired as a Senior SWE. Had some graph questions, and honestly I've had to do a fair amount of graph related stuff at Google, so it's not a bad thing IMO.

I spent about a month covering the book, and then grokking the systems design.

It’s not so much the knowledge as the familiarity with the interview format and expectations (ask clarifying questions, explain your reasoning). The company I ended up joining had an opportunity for a mock phone screen interview, which I took advantage of. It was roughly a LC easy but covered the format and gave me some feedback on how I conducted myself.

I want to work for 10 years then go back to my origin country and just live a simpler life.

But as a infrastructure, architecture, and security person I've never been asked a single coding question. It's all about the above mentioned topics. The fact I can sling a little code is just a value add.

If you are interviewing with me, you won't be asked about an algorithm; you'll be asked about SAML and the differences between IdP initiated and SP initiated login flows.

So what do you want to do? Make sure you have a few projects and can speak to those experiences.

Not a coder/dev, for what its worth.

Why? Because resume-building for high-profile employers begins long before graduation. Probably the most important factor: internships. Getting an internship is the highest-probability way of getting an offer bar none. If you don't have 1 or preferably 2 internships under your belt then you've made a mistake.

The second is that passing interview loops is a skill. It's one that can be studied for, learned and practiced. And if you're serious about this then you should do that. Many recommend CLRS [1] as a source for this. Personally, my choice would be Skiena [2]. Go through all the chapters on sorting and searching, lists, trees, graphs and possibly dynamic programming (some employers use this in interviews, some don't). Backtracking is useful but I've never seen it in an interview.

Do the same problems on an actual whiteboard. Don't just think about it. Get comfortable enough with any popular language (eg Javascript, Python, C/C++, Go, Java) such that the syntax and common libraries are second nature.

It's not unsalvageable to do this at the end of college (if that's the case). You just need to commit a few months to it.

Some will ask "why FAANG?" and the answer is obvious: the money can be life-changing but even aside from that it's an opportunity to learn a lot and having that on your resume is amazing social proof that will quickly eclipse the value of going to a top-tier school.

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Algorithms-3rd-MIT-Press...

[2]: https://www.algorist.com/

- got an applied maths / CS degree in the beginning of 2000s, followed by a non-STEM master's degree and almost 10 years in a non-tech career

- burned out, quit job

- spent about a year working on pet projects and (re-)learning programming, then a couple of years on a startup with co-founders (which didn't gain much traction)

- moved to a different country for a developer job. I didn't want to ask my old connections for recommendations, so I just took an offer from a small company that found me on Monster or something similar

- after a couple of years, things at the company became worse, so I started looking for a new job. By that time, I had a circle of friends in the new country, some of which worked at FAANGs and asked me if I wanted a referral.

- I had remembered most of the theoretical stuff needed for LC interview from my CS course from 15 years ago, so I just needed to refresh it, cover the topics I didn't know and have some practice. That took me about a month or two of weekends, evenings and lunch breaks.

- I was so frustrated with my job that I took leetcoding as a pleasurable distraction - I didn't really need anything to maintain discipline. The country was in lockdown, so I didn't have much else to do anyway.

- the whole process from deciding to change jobs to getting an offer took about 4 months. I interviewed at around 5 companies, got 2 offer (one FAANG and one non-FAANG) and decided to take the FAANG one instead. Not sure if this job is a viable road to FIRE (and not sure if this concept is for me at all) but I like it so far.

After grinding for years and finally becoming financially independent, my advice to people considering the same is: don't.

Instead, focus on making small improvements to your daily quality of life. From sleep, to exercise, to diet, to finding a project/team/company that is aligned with your personal enjoyment. Try things out and stick to whatever works for you at the moment.

The reason for this is that becoming financially independent is not going to magically make you a happier person, it just gives you more free time. If you were bitter and joyless from years of keeping your nose to the grindstone, once you retire you will just be a bitter and joyless person with extra free time to simmer in your own misery.

Happiness happens today, not some distant future.

I practiced for weeks or months and thoroughly immersed myself in it. Different people would likely need to practice less. Practice enough to transform your though process from "I'm nervous" to "I've trained for this." I probably over prepared, but I'm the kind of person who would rather show up too early for an airplane flight than to endure the stress of maybe missing the flight. Also whenever I do a long talk, I spend an embarrassing amount of time preparing for it. But if you take weeks or more to prepare don't beat yourself up about it. And keep in mind that if you don't get the job it's not the end of the world. You can come back and interview again. In short the only way you can fail is to give up.

Another very useful thing to do when preparing is make a list of stories you'd like to be able to tell. Little 1-2 minute stories of different important things that you have done. Rehearse telling those stories. When you look at lists of common behavioral interview questions ("tell me about a time you convinced your team to do something" etc.) think about which stories you would tell to answer such questions. Good stories will have several kinds of questions they can answer; during the interview, look for opportunities to tell some of these stories. This is a trick that a top sales person taught me, and has been very useful to me.

If you're transitioning from one kind of technology to another, and the job you're shooting for requires experience in a field you have no experience in, then do some work to prepare a portfolio you can point to. For example, when I made the transition into an AI job that required demonstrated experience with machine learning, I spent a good amount of time preparing a portfolio of work I could point to.

Many people spend a lot of time talking about how it's useless to jump through these hoops to get a FAANG job, and how broken the process is. Do not distract yourself worrying about this; if you want to land the job you need to go prepare. While needing the actual knowledge is somewhat debatable, it's good to be able to demonstrate that you're the kind of person who can dive in to hard-to-learn things and get the learning done. Because once you get the job, you're going to be diving into hard-to-learn systems that you won't know anything about.