- Github
- Resume
- Experience at a smaller company
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Top comments (3)
TBH you need to find a role, check the requirements, try to demonstrate expertise in 1-2 areas, either in the form of experience, projects/portfolio, something that is either in direct alignment with the role or has sufficient evidence of transferrable skills.
Once you do that, you need someone who already works at that company to give you a referral. Or find someone who knows someone who knows someone who can help you! ;)
This is the quickest way to land an interview with any company in the world. For FAANG specifically, in addition to all the above, you'll need to prep DS Algo very well (especially trees, graphs and DP if you are serious). That's my best advice as a FAANG engineer :D
All the best!
I interviewed with Amazon twice (got an offer the first time, declined. Second time, took an offer elsewhere before finishing Amazon's interview process) and Google once (onsite, no offer). And I guess it doesn't count anymore, but got an offer from Microsoft too.
The first time I interviewed with Amazon was as a new-grad. I assume my university's good reputation was the main factor. I also had a couple of summers of internship experience at a big-but-not-super-prestigious company and good references from there.
When I interviewed with Microsoft and Google, it was after 3.5 years of working at the aforementioned big-but-not-super-prestigious company (that's where I ended up instead of Amazon). I guess my experience there was the main factor.
The second time I interviewed with Amazon, it was after 2 years of being a "digital nomad" and I don't think that looked great on paper. But ever since the first offer from Amazon, their recruiters have been emailing me constantly, so I guess they remembered the first offer and wanted to interview me again because of that.
On the other hand, I never heard from a Microsoft recruiter again after I turned down their offer.
Anyway, I guess those experiences of mine might not be that applicable to most of your users. But I have a bunch of projects on GitHub, a couple of them have around a hundred stars, and the last time I was going through the interview process, it seemed like recruiters were really interested in that. I think there are a lot of companies that will look at your projects on GitHub and base a hiring decision largely on that. But a lot of recruiters won't look and won't care. If you've got free time, and you've got an idea, I think it can benefit job hunters to build a thing or two and throw it on GitHub. Just try to make the code decent :)
I also get contacted by a ton of recruiters on LinkedIn, at least a few per week. I don't think there's anything super special on my LinkedIn, but clearly a lot of recruiters are searching for people there. I think making an account on LinkedIn is a no-brainer. Anyone can do it and it's crawling with recruiters.
As for "experience at a smaller company", yeah that's great to have, but that also takes at least a year to not be considered a "job hopper". So anyone who goes down this route will need to postpone their FAANG ambitions for years.
Resume, sure, it's good to get some different opinions about your resume, make sure it doesn't have spelling mistakes, try to use active language, etc. That's another thing that's fairly easy so I think everyone should put a little effort into it.
Hey, I recently been offered a job at AWS and I believe that the most important parts are experience with some projects (the size of the company does not matter that much) and also your Resume.
If you need any more info feel free to reach out 🙂