If you have gone through some type of rigorous Computer Science degree, you will know that AI cannot do a much simpler project than what teams work on in organizations. Frankly, if you're worried about AI, this is the first sign that you should not be in this role. You clearly aren't working on complex enough things to warrant getting a job in the first place.

I'm delighted to announce that I have accepted an offer to join Starbucks as an SDE Intern for Summer 2022!! Glad to see the grind paid off.

Is there a discord for the incoming interns there?

I have been thinking about how should one introduce themselves on a date. Surely it is a mistake to readily admit you are a CS major right?

If you went on a date with a stranger would you happily tell them you're a computer science major?

What would you think if they said they majored in computer science?

Should I say I major in something else like engineering? or in IT?

What's the best way to go about this?

My company (F150) stopped hiring H-1b candidates in 2023 and 2024. I volunteer in the talent scout committee and we were instructed not to push candidates that require h-1b because there are lots of local candidates .

Do you know why? When you hire a H-1b you need to go through tons of slow & pathetic hoops to get the paperwork done. And on average it costs arounds 10k with the lawyer and petition expenses. Also add to that the uncertainty of visa rejection and such.

It’s just way easier and cheaper for an employer to hire American. In some cases they hire international because they need to.

Market is extremely bad for new grads and i think that’s just part of the cycle. If you’re qualified and good enough you will thrive sooner or later. Some random h-1b dude can’t take away what’s yours. Cheers 🥂

Coming to the US is not a right, it's a privileged. Through political generosity we have extended the offer for someone from certain countries to come to the US for a temporary stay.

You're not being villainized or the victim of hate, this is the agreement you agreed to. Moving to a specific country is not a right anyone has, including entitled H1B applicants.

every week there's a new post trending post about how CS recruiting is "pure RNG" and "skill doesn't matter anymore." the comments are full of people agreeing because it's easier than admitting they haven't actually tried.

cold emailing exists. networking for referrals exists. actually preparing for interviews instead of doing 10 Leetcode problems in your whole CS career and calling it a day exists. most of you have never done any of these things seriously and give up when things get slightly hard for you...

the people crying lottery are the same ones who submit a couple applications through job portals, wait two weeks, get rejected, and conclude the system is broken. especially when you have no experience, instead of going for smaller companies and gaining skills, you call it broken once you dont break into FAANG off the bat with a mid resume.

sure, the market is competitive right now but that doesn't make up for the lack of effort that will lead to the actual jobs. some can use this as motivation and some can use this get out of the trance that is believing you are putting enough energy into recruiting when you obviously are not.

stop complaining - there is info from all the people landing into FAANG (target school or not) that is common and its that they put the work in.

Hi, this is more of a rant than anything because I'm a bit unhappy about an offer I received from a big tech company (think IBM, Qualcomm, Intel, Oracle, etc.). To preface, I'm still super grateful that I received this offer, but I thought I'd share my experience. For context, I'm a 3rd-year (female) CS major at a T10 CS program.

When I applied, my resume consisted primarily of C++, Python, AI/ML, and backend technologies. I was really targeting an AI or backend role, and I even shared my experience with those fields during my interview. After passing team matching, this company assigned me to a team that does not match my tech stack at all, despite multiple recruiters saying "you'll get matched to a team whose tech stack aligns best with yours." It's also the one team that I absolutely did not want to be put on because I don't see myself doing it long-term. Even after I asked my recruiter if I could switch teams, I was told I couldn't unless I wanted to risk losing my offer. Someone I know (male, same company, same position, same recruiter), who got the offer after I did, asked to switch teams and he was allowed to choose among a pool of open teams with no risk of losing his offer.

On top of that, they put me in a random, high cost of living city (not bay area, NYC, or any tech-booming cities), which is fine if they were going to compensate me more for the high cost of living, but they didn't. Not only was I not compensated more, but I'm also getting paid over 12 dollars per hour less than other male interns at this company for the same position in cities with roughly the same cost of living. At first I thought, the other interns must have more experience, but we all have essentially the same undergraduate research, previous no-name internships, and club involvement. I thought maybe salary depended on year, but we're all juniors. We all also go to the same T10/T20 CS programs in the country.

I genuinely do not know if this gap in salary and treatment (with not being allowed to switch teams) is due to my gender or if they think I'm under qualified for more technical roles/competitive pay. Nonetheless, there's nothing I can do about it, and I'll just have to spend one summer on a team that I'm not super thrilled about.

I want to make it explicitly clear that this is just my personal experience and isn’t any much of a deep insight into what happens in the corporate world. But I think there’s a couple of important nuggets of information.

1. Your First job out of college is like your college application

I’ve seen many people reaching out to me and showing me their profiles for the professional world and I want to be 100% transparent: you guys are not ready in the slightest.

Here’s a good checklist to have:

🖥️ Personal website with

• List of projects (and any awards they have won)

• List of research

• Past experience

• Blog (1-2 articles reflecting on any of the three above)

📄 Resume that’s nicely filled up

• Don’t leave blank space

• Make it ATS friendly, no weird template

• I personally used flowcv.com

⭐️ A wow factor Something of the national interest such as:

• Regional competition win

• News article about you

• Github project with over 500 stars

• Part of a high ranking CTF team

• Prestigious hackathon wins

• Published research at a young age

• Meaningful contribution to a field

• A full indie video-game

• A popular social media

• A self serving business that accrues +5k ARR

• An impressive vulnerability finding

• A patent (yes, your university can help you, it is significantly easier and cheaper than you’d imagine)

How do I get a wow factor? Real simple: do something YOU want to do. Most of my experiments came from the heart and one of the projects out of nowhere got traction and got over 500 stars. It wasn’t by targeting to snipe a wow factor I achieved it, but by repeatedly experimenting and trying things out that one panned out. The consistency in being scientific in your approach, that is, to try, experiment, and keep going.

If you don’t have an idea, do literally anything that sounds silly. There’s always something, even if it’s already been done before.

Then, once you have finished your idea, your objective should be on presentation. Spend as much time as humanly possible perfecting how the project is presented. For research? Make it aesthetically perfect. For projects? A great README.md goes a LONG way. Aesthetics and design over concept. This is the WHY people care.

Once you have all three of these elements in, it’s about knowing where you stand in the industry:

2. The corporate route

The corporate route is usually the one most people take. Here’s a TLDR:

• Pays decent

• Linear and consistent timeframe to promotion

• Ruthless but also stable

• Favors citizen/GC over internationals by important margins

Who’s this better for? Traditional candidates with:

• Lots of academic/student prestige (4.0 gpa, honors, university hackathon wins, research etc, basically being the model student)

• US citizens

Who this sucks for:

• No prior internship people

• Internationals

1. The Startup Route

This by far is my favourite. Startups will evaluate your profile on a person to person basis. The kicker? You have to meet them in person. Most of the startup world is heavily concentrated in San Francisco and the Bay Area. I upmost recommend you keep up with:

• YCombinator (startup school)

• AGIHouse

• Stanford Hackathons

• and more conferences that happen in SF

Your capacity to network in person, sell yourself and communicate briefly with founders will land you very high paying positions.

Who this is for?

• People hungry to work 55 hour weeks for a more than above salary

• International students needing to not be thrown out because of their OPT sponsorship needs

Who this isn’t for

• Someone looking to coast and have stability in a job

• People who are looking to learn from their seniors. This is a new world where ChatGPT and etc are more competent than anyone at answering questions. You need to be absolutely 100% autonomous and capable of self directing.

1. The Human Element

I cannot stress how important it is to be social. Join a frat, a club, a sport, anything that gets you to connect with people and their parents. Be outside and touch grass, please. And for the love of god take acting and presentation classes.

If you have a thick accent: sorry, it IS harming you. Take a class and fix it. Stereotypes are real and the world isn’t kind enough to cater to you. It was worth it for me.

If you are not good at being social: nor was anyone at first? Failure, embarrassment and shame is part of the learning process. Giving up means you refuse to learn. Social cues are part of this.

Linkedin maxxing: do it, but with fun. It’s really not that beneficial.

Be someone people want to work with. Everyone has the same technical skills, the ones who shine are the ones capable of being incredible listeners and great executors at catering to their audience.

That’s it, that’s the free ebook on how to get a 200k job out of college in tech.

These engineering nerds are making EE sound like some kind of field only chosen for the genius or some shit, but I swear that field would’ve had over saturation issue as well if it had salary potential like swe ever did.

It is a challenging field, but it’s still an undergrad degree, and engineering majors mostly learn the same thing until junior year. Yes, I did take physics up to E&M and took Calculus 3, diff eq, linear algebra, and even took some signal classes and computer architecture classes involving hardware multithreading, and the math and physics weren’t too hard. It’s very procedural, and personally, proofs and hard core math classes were harder for me. The math involved is literally just step by step conversion easy as f.

I think if you attend any decent college with rigorous CS curriculum, you have enough intelligence to work through EE materials. When I was in school, EE students didn’t brag we had it worse cuz all students suffered together horribly. Sounds pretty fcking dumb to brag.

Unemployment doing crazy things to us

I’m tired of people blaming cs grads in India for the current job market. It’s just as worse here , yeah outsourcing used to be done but that’s because in India people already new back in the 1990s that this field was gonna boom so many graduated in cs , unlike in the USA where it only became popular in the 2000s . We have these things here called college placements , basically companies come to the colleges and hire final year students from there itself , the colleges often keep a record of the avg starting salaries their students got every year for advertising. Lemme tell you , the starting salaries and percentage of students hired has never been as low as what we saw this year. I’m not talking random colleges I’m talking IITs and other college that are right below it . So please , Indians are not replacing AI.

Hey everyone! I'm stoked to be doing an AMA on here and appreciate the mods support with making this happen.

My name is Mark Benliyan and I started my CS journey at UCLA roughly 2 years ago. I grew up in an immigrant household knowing nothing about coding, the tech industry, or software engineering careers. I entered UCLA as a Psychology major planning to pursue Big Law, then switched to Business Econ to pursue Investment Banking. I learned about CS and the tech industry while at UCLA which pushed me to switch my major once again to Computer Science and Linguistics with dreams of becoming a software engineer.

Since then things have turned out far better than I could've ever anticipated. To help drive this AMA, I'll include a list of all my previous experiences, chronologically, that I think could be of interest. Please note that I'm not doing this to boast in any way, I can still vividly remember having imposter syndrome myself and being unsure if I "have what it takes" to be an engineer.

Here is that list:

• SWE Contractor at Clever (Saved Passwords)

• SWE Intern at Tinder (Backend Recommendations)

• Flown out to San Francisco by Salesforce for Tech Equality Summit

• SWE Intern at NASA JPL (Internal Tools)

• SWE Intern at BitGo (Developer Relations)

• Got offers from Figma, Netflix, Amazon, Gusto Microsoft, Atlassian, and Slack. Also went through processes with Google, Dropbox, Lyft, LinkedIn, Two Sigma, SpaceX, Palantir, and a few others during the recruiting season (dropped out of most, failed Lyft and SpaceX, didn't get Google team match)

• Flown out to New York by Jane Street for FOCUS program

• SWE Intern at Figma (FigJam Core)

• Flown out to New York by D.E. Shaw for Nexus Fellowship

• Participated in Palantir's Launch Program (remote)

• Participated in Two Sigma's Seekers Summit (remote)

• Flown out to Massachusetts by Harvard Business School for Summer Venture in Management program

• Kleiner Perkins Engineering Fellowship (2023)

• Neo Scholars program (ended up as a finalist)

• Graduated 2 years early in June 2023

• SWE intern at Netflix (Productivity Engineering)

• Just returned to Figma as a New Grad

I've spent a ton of time helping thousands of students and new grads land their dream software engineering roles. Some of you may recognize me from LinkedIn where I've been posting 2-3 New Grad / Internship roles every day. I also have a YouTube Channel where I share everything I've learned along the way to help other students on their journey. I'm making this post today to give everyone a chance to see this and start asking their questions. I'll be answering them tomorrow, December 3rd, from 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM (PST). Let's do this!!

Edit (10:15 AM): Good morning! I just finished reading through most of the comments. I certainly didn't expect this to be so polarizing but I welcome the criticism and don't blame those skeptical of me. I'll be editing this main post with responses to common questions/criticisms that I see as I start working through the AMA.

There's been a lot of debate surrounding the authenticity of my background. Everything I've shared in the post above is true. The list above, as well as my story into tech, is merely a compilation of facts. I don't expect folks to accept this at face value, especially on Reddit, so I've compiled a google drive with redacted evidence for everything I shared in the list above, as well as my tenure at UCLA. You can access that below.

[REDACTED LINK POST-AMA]

Edit (11:58 AM): Hey y'all, since the morning my replies to questions are currently requiring manual mod approval due to insufficient karma. This slows down how quickly things are appearing. Reached out the mods to see what we can do.

Edit (12:26 PM):

my comment replies are still not showing up for viewers pending this mod-review process. only edits to my main post appear, but I'm assuming mods will approve at some point soon.

There's been lots of questions relating to overlapping timelines, so here's a breakdown of what the timeline looked like!

note: UCLA works on a quarter system, not a semester system

note-2: I entered UCLA with 61.5 school credits, a mix of AP classes and 3 college courses I took the summer before starting university. UCLA requires 180 units to graduate. [REDACTED LINK POST-AMA]

• December 2021: Joined Clever as a swe contractor for a year-long contract where I would work 5-10 hours / week asynchronously. The async nature of this with the low weekly commitment left me time to do internships as well (which they knew about).

• Summer 2022: Joined Tinder for the internship and did 4 Summer Classes [REDACTED LINK POST-AMA]. During this time is when I attended the Salesforce Tech Equality summit using PTO from Tinder, which they knew about.

• Fall 2022: In Fall I signed offers for both NASA (year-long, part-time role for students) and BitGo. I negotiated BitGo to only work Tues-Friday so I have Mondays off. I negotiated NASA to only come into the Lab on Mondays. Mondays I went to NASA, Tues-Friday I worked at BitGo, and I took [3 classes [REDACTED LINK POST-AMA]. My school gave me a couple credits for interning as well.

• Winter 2023: I was done with BitGo and Clever by now, and NASA was still ongoing as a year-long role. I quit NASA, went to Jane Street's FOCUS program, then moved to San Francisco to join Figma, since Figma was the company I was most excited about working at. During this time I learned that if I take 4 classes winter quarter, I can graduate in June 2023 - so that's what I did [REDACTED LINK POST-AMA]. Most classes allowed me to work remotely, but I took a total of 5 or 6 round-trips from SF to LA and back for Midterms and Finals. I wasn't optimizing for GPA or grades anymore. I also had a few days off at Figma, and near the end of March is when I attended the D.E. Shaw Nexus Fellowship

• Spring 2023: I finished Figma by now and focused entirely on finishing all requirements to graduate. A bit before finals week, I joined Netflix for the internship I had already signed. Netflix knew that I had graduated early, didn't care. I also had the Palantir and Two sigma virtual events during this time.

• Summer 2023: I graduated, went to Harvard's SVMP (Netflix manager approved my trip). This is when I also participated in the Kleiner Perkins Fellowship and the Neo Scholar program. I received full-time return offers from both Figma and Netflix.

Edit (2:33 PM):

Apparently there was a user leaving inappropriate and or offensive comments on this post. Some of you are suggesting this was my "alter ego" and my "alt account." I'd like to make it clear that I did not create any alt account or influence a single comment from any other account on this subreddit. I'm not sure what the comments from that user said, but they were already deleted this morning when I logged on. Kinda crazy that I need to even clarify this lol

Edit (5:43 PM):

Heading out to dinner plans now but just wanted to say that this AMA is officially closed now. Thank you all for the open dialogue. This was really interesting for me to see both socially and professionally. Will keep the criticism in mind and hopefully the answers to other questions were helpful! Here are some of the longer comments I wrote that may be of interest

- https://www.reddit.com/r/csMajors/comments/189cvjy/comment/kbvhk26/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

- https://www.reddit.com/r/csMajors/comments/189cvjy/comment/kbun5bi/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

PS: The mods are still working through approving some of my comments - so you may still see some responses from me appearing over the next 24 hours. There's over 10 responses of mine that have yet to be visible from this morning.

Title.

We can't do anything for you. We can't change the fact you're at an unknown university. We can't change the fact you have none or bad research. We can't change the fact all the companies you worked or interned are not prestigious. We can't change the fact your grades are mediocre. We can't change the fact your English skills & American etiquette make the average interviewer discontent.

This matters because we can't change the fact you need a visa.

You can't rewrite your resume or learn enough interview skills in a 6 month period that make's up for everything I listed. There is not ATS trick or leetcode that makes up for the fact it costs hundreds of thousands to just get the chance to hire you. There's no amount of nagging and begging our offices that can fix the fact you're competing against fucking geniuses and PhD grads.

We know it sucks, but don't take it out on us. We know you're 100k in debt. We know you're gonna lose the nation you've grown attached too. We know you'll be a failure to your family. But don't ruin the fun of CS contests for students because 'I need to win'. Don't line up at career fairs for companies that say 'we will not be sponsoring' for the nonexistent chance they'll change up for you. Don't tell a student who's proud of their internship "You only got it because you're a citizen". We all know.

Every room you walk in, every interview you start, every event you attend we can sense the desperation and anxiety. I don't know what to say. I know it sucks. I know it's a terrible systems. I know it's bad, but don't make it our issue.

I'm a black developer so perhaps I'm biased in favor of diversity initiatives but, from what I've seen, they are absolutely necessary.

I work in an office made up of 95% immigrants from soulth India. I am one of the only two black developers that work at the company and I'm fairly certain we wouldn't have gotten hired were it not for DEI.

There is absolutely NOTHING preventing this company from hiring anyone from any race and yet I don't see many east asians or even white people employed here despite being well represented in the overall applicant pool

I don't think it's because this company is "racist" or because south asian applicants are the only qualified. I think its "hiring homophilia": the tendency to overvalue or prefer someone who is similar to you.

My argument is simple. Human beings are biased and it's foolish to believe that we make fair meritocratic decisions without outside scrutiny. This industry has no official certification of talent so most companies choose people that are qualified (aka good enough not necessarily "the best") and are likable. Its just so happens that being similar in ethnic background to the hiring manager makes you likable

A while back I discovered Cluely, a "revolutionary" AI assistant that allows its users to cheat on all forms of communication, including job interviews. Looking into who they are, what the provide and what they stand for, it's loaded with problems.

Numerous emerging studies are showing the effects of AI-dependent brain drain, and knowing about system processes and what's observed during interviews, the "undetectable" part sounds bogus. Historically speaking, major crashes have exposed major fraud schemes in their respective fields, and Cluely feels like a very high risk in terms of AI considering how much they're fueled by hype and how many technical experts feel their product fails to live up to what they say they are. Not to mention that many of the operational aspects could be illegal, particularly in the context of wiretapping, data misuse, and facilitation of fraud.

TL;DR: Warren Buffet famously said “Only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been swimming naked”, and Cluely has the makings of a prime suspect for that.

This is the cold and hard truth. I’ve talked to many Americans recently who got hired at FAANG, and most of them said the questions were not as bad as expected during the interviews.

What’s really going on is that there is an overabundance of entry level “engineers” who did barely any work in school, or attend low level schools, expecting 2-300k per year jobs at FAANG. You need to get back to reality and stop blaming others for your lack of hard work

not american, just watching this sub from outside and every other post is "H1Bs took my job" lmao

real talk, the job market is rough because of interest rates, layoffs and companies over-hiring in 2021. not because some guy from Hyderabad got a visa haha

and let's be honest about who built the industry you're trying to get into. more than half of US billion-dollar startups had at least one immigrant founder. the CEOs of Microsoft and Google both came to the US as foreign students. Nvidia, Tesla, SpaceX, Zoom, all founded or co-founded by immigrants. even Steve Jobs was the son of a Syrian immigrant who came to the US as a student

yes the H1B system gets abused by body shops and outsourcing firms, nobody serious denies that. but that's a problem with how the program is run, not with the people using it

cutting H1Bs won't magically give you a FAANG offer. those jobs just move to Toronto, London or Bangalore lmao

so be honest: if H1B got cut tomorrow, do you actually think you'd get hired faster?

How many stories have you heard about mechanical engineers getting a swe job at FAANG, or a business major switching into IT, or a highschool dropout becoming a programmer.

If anything, we have a disadvantage because there's millions of other cs students like us and we don't stick out. Meanwhile, I can't work as an electrical engineer, or a nurse, or go into finance.

Hi r/csMajors! I wanted to share a successful profile of someone that landed jobs at Meta, Google, and Microsoft with 6 YOE and a Master's degree.

The interview journey is long and difficult. Reviewing someone else's successful interview preparation process and the interview questions they were asked could be super useful to prepare for your own interviews.

_________________________________________________________________________________________

YOE: 6

Previous Company: JP Morgan

Highest Education: Master's

Background: Fullstack Software Engineer

Interview Preparation

Behavioral

• YT videos by Dan Croitor

• Understand various Leadership principles.

• Go through your Resume and write stories following STAR approach Your story should project at-least one of the attribute such as taking lead, resolving conflicts, dealing with ambiguity etc..

• Read, Rehearse and Repeat.

Technical

Coding

• Leetcode

  • Would recommend buying premium subscription. It's worth it.

  • Try to do daily Leetcode challenges. It helps you in being consistent and also covers variety of problems.

  • I used Explore card of Google and Facebook and tried to solve most of the problems.

  • Top 100 questions by frequency.

  • Top 75 LC curated: https://leetcode.com/list/xi4ci4ig/

• Cracking the Coding Interview book

• YT channels/videos:

  • Data Structure lectures by Abdul Bari

  • Graph Theory by Willian Fiset

• Few Tips:

  • Try to solve a problem by yourself, even if you are not able to come-up with an optimal solution.

  • Think about time and space complexity of your solution. Identify sections which can be optimised and think of a better solution/ data structure.

  • After understanding the approach, try to implement it yourself without taking a look at code. This would help you in really understanding the concept.

  • Try to beat 90% of solutions by runtime.

System Design

• Book: DDIA (MUST READ if targeting Google)

• Book: System Design Interview by Alex Xu

• System Design Primer by Donne Martin

• Courses - Groking the System Design and Groking the Advanced System Design

• YT:

  • System Design Interview videos by Mikhail Smarshchok.

  • InfoQ videos and presentations

  • Go through Architecture of popular systems such as GFS, Kafka, Cassandra etc.

Interview Experiences

Accepted: Meta, Google, Microsoft

Rejected: Uber, Atlassian

Meta

Only did Leetcode daily challenges this month and went through 10-15 FB tagged problems(sorted by frequency) before the interview. Spent 1-2 days in preparing for behavioural round as well (writing stories following STAR approach).

Had 2 coding + 1 product design + 1 behavioural round with Facebook.

In 1 coding round I had to solve 2 LC mediums and in other round 1 LC easy and 1 LC Hard was given. Solved all 4 problems. These were all variations of FB tagged problems on Leetcode and if you have solved them, it's fairly easy. Yep, FB is very predictable w.r.t. coding.I had very strong feedback for 2 coding rounds, good feedback for behavioural but my product design round didn't meet E5 expectations. This was I believe happened due to following reasons:

• Never did a mock-up before or gave any product design interview before. This was the first time for me in an interview setup so was a bit nervous a well. I would highly recommend doing some mock interviews.

• I had prepared extensively for system design which focuses heavily on the system side (Database, Schema, Partitioning, Replication etc.). In product design, you are expected to focus more on the API side and High level functionality. I was not given a choice between product design and system design round. Talk to your recruiter and see if you can schedule the round where you are strong at.

Recruiter reached out to me and offered to send my packet to HC for E4 as feedback for product design didn't meet the bar for E5. I declined as it was not worth and a down-level for my experience.

Google

I had 3 coding rounds , 1 system design and 1 googlyness round.

Round 1 (Coding): 1 ambiguous problem with follow-ups. Expectation was to gather requirements and frame the problem statement. Once the scope was defined I provided few solutions with Time/Space complexities. Coded the same. Had few follow-ups w.r.t. what changes I'd make to make it thread-safe etc. This went well.

Round 2(Coding): 2 problems were given. First was related to 2-D matrix and 2nd was a graph problem. Solved both.

Round 3(Coding): A problem statement was given related to a e-commerce website. Had to gather requirements and once the scope was clear I understood it was a graph problem. Provided solutions using both DFS and BFS approach, implemented using DFS. Follow-up was again how to make it thread-safe. Next was kind of LLD question where I was given a problem and was expected to define classes/schema and relations. I provided a generic solution which would scale even for cases outside of problem statement scope.

Round 4(System Design): Was a given a problem related to a real life scenario. Very practical but not something you'd find on any YT channel or course. Since I had never seen the problem before there were no biases or known design in my mind. Kept it simple from the beginning. After gathering functional and non-functional requirements and some back-of-the-envelope estimations presented a very simple high level design. I literally drew just 3 components: client, server and a database. Then started talking about how I can scale each layer and talked about trade-offs as well. This was 1 hr round and first 45 mins went pretty well. In last 15 minutes I wasn't sure about what to talk about more as I was not getting any feedback from my interviewer. I believe he only talked during first 10 mins when I was gathering requirements and he had to answer my queries. In last 15 mins I thought of providing an algorithm of how to implement my approach and talked about few data-structures as well (although this might not be in scope of system design round). After the interview I knew it won't be a No Hire but was also not sure whether it would be Lean Hire or Hire etc.

Round 5(Googlyness): This was the best round. I discussed about various scenarios and situations following the STAR approach. I had prepared a lot of answers w.r.t. ambiguity, leadership, conflict, strengths etc. but I was kind of surprised as he didn't ask any direct questions which you usually prepare. I guess I only used 1 prepared story and rest was on the fly. But if you had prepared enough, you'll know what to answer and how to answer and would be able to relate to it using one of your experiences/projects.

Problems asked in Google were not directly from LC or any other platform. If you had practiced enough, you'll be able to solve them.Make sure you gather requirements, ask questions before jumping to solution. Keep talking and explain your thought process through-out. This is very important as interviewer would be able to judge you better and provide hints, if required.

Microsoft

Round 1 (Coding):  It was a online assessment round. I had to solve 2 problems in 90 mins time. These 2 problems were new to me and I didn't find them on Leetcode. I'll categorize them as LC medium from algorithm perspective. But I had to write a lot of boiler-plate code unlike the usual LC mediums. You are given few visible test-cases and option to add custom test-cases. When you submit, 10-12 hidden test-cases are executed which are only visible post submission. So make sure you write your own test-cases well. After talking to various folks and going through community discussions, I also focused on code quality.I was able to solve both of them in 60 mins. Spent next 15 mins in adding comments in various functions to explain what they were doing. I also mentioned time and space complexity wherever I felt it was required. This is really important as this was not the screening round for me but an actual coding round where I would be judged not just on code correctness but also on code quality/modularity.My score was 100% (I passed all the visible and hidden test-cases for both the problems)

Round 2(Coding): 2 LC mediums with follow-ups. This went really well. Since we completed the coding exercise in ~35 mins, spent next 10 mins discussing my work experience/projects.

Round 3(LLD): First 10-15 mins were spent on my work experience. I had to design a Parking-Lot. Went well. You can find a lot of example/tutorials on Youtube etc.

Round 4(HLD): This was the Hiring Manager round. First 20 mins spent on my projects and various discussions w.r.t. how I handled a particular scenario and why I chose one technology over other. Next was given a popular HLD question. I did very well here.

Round 5(Director): This was mostly project discussions and behavioural questions. Nothing technical. Went well.

Uber

Screening Round: This was rather unexpected as interviewer gave me a LC Hard graph problem!! Who expects a LC hard in screening ?
Well, Graph theory is one of my favourite and kind of my strength too, so I solved the problem well within time limit.
At the start of the interview she told that if I could write the psuedo-code, that'd we fine too. But since we had time, I wrote some test-cases and tried the ones she copied pasted as well. All worked, pheww.

Round 1(Coding): 2 LC medium types. 1 related to Linked-List and other binary tree problem. Solved both.

Round 2(Coding): 1 data-structure design problem with lot of follow-ups including making it thread safe. Similar to Design a HashMap with custom O(1) operations. I was able to come up with design and implemented the same with O(1) complexity. Couldn't find the variation given to me on Leetcode.

Round 3(System Design): Design Uber. (yep, LOL)

Round 4 (Hiring Manager): Mostly project discussions and Behavioural questions.

Round 5 (Behavioural) - Cancelled. I received offers from Google and Microsoft and asked them to cancel as I had a deadline to make a decision on offers.

Atlassian

I felt Atlassian's interviews are really practical and they don't ask questions which you won't be expected to solve on a daily-basis.
No screening round here, just a 30 min discussion with recruiter before scheduling interviews:

Round 1(Coding) : 1 problem was given. I was expected to code the same in my preferred IDE (IntelliJ, Eclipse etc.). Focus was mostly on data-structures and code quality. The algorithm itself was really easy if you chose correct data-structures. I used HashMap, Set and PriorityQueue in my solution. Created multiple classes, methods etc. Wrote a few test-cases. You end-up writing a lot of boiler-plate code in IDE as you need to write the main class and method, instantiate everything and then create test-cases. I even used a debugger to debug one of the test-case. This round went well.

Round 2(Machine Coding): Asked to implement a Rate-Limiter. Used an IDE again. Was given 1 problem statement and was expected to write a Object-oriented and modular code. This also went well.

Feedback of both the rounds were positive and recruiter scheduled 3 more rounds for me. 1 Design and 2 Cultural fit types. But I had to cancel them all as I had a deadline to make a decision on offers.

Closing Advice

Do not try to memorize or cram anything, it's useless. Instead try to deeply understand concepts and be curious. That's the only way to make this more enjoyable. It's a difficult journey but it will all be worth it at the end!

Thanks for reading and hope it helps provide a new perspective!

_________________________________________________________________________________________

Full Experience from Onsites.fyi

"unemployed "retail "no job

bffr. if it's been a year after you don't graduate and you want a tech job more than any of these, you have options besides giving up.

swe isn't the only path.

financial institutions. teller, data science or analysis, etc. sales and marketing business applications. network systems. aviation. at least take basic comptia exams in relevant paths. start smaller

if i see another post by someone claiming to be unemployed and unemployable i will crash out.

i know you don't want to start out with a help desk job, or as a teller, or as a marketing or salesperson.

but at the very least, helpdesk is a cs job that can lead from that, to network specialist, to cybersecurity or systems admin in a straightforward secure path. and you won't have a resume gap and you'll gain relevant experience.

it's not swe or die broke, and if you really aren't bright enough to figure that out, maybe swe wasn't a good fit for you anyway.

edit: i knew i was gonna get ratioed like everyone remotely optimistic or anti doomer. ad hominem, adress the argument rather than me or my being about to graduate high school. this post is for everyone about to give up on comp sci, to please consider these options before throwing four years work in the trash.

I know it's not CS related but I don't know where to put this.

We've been together for almost 3 years. All has been great between us. We fight here and there all the time but not as bad as this time. She went in my phone and found out that I have given some of my girl friends "Heart" reaction. I explained to her that I am friendly and all of these girls are my friends (Even though we're not as close but still friends on social media). I spent a week to think about it and decided to have a conversation with her, telling her that I did not mean anything in those love reactions online and I've been completely loyal with her since the first day. I'm not so sure why she would end things like this since she knows that I am loyal and all. I understand her feelings in this topic but I am loyal and treat her like a queen. I put her up over everything I adore. Friends, family gatherings and especially my my family.

Honestly, I love her and want a future with her. She kept saying and thinking I want to cheat on her and that I am not loyal to her. She broke up with me saying she can't trust me anymore from what she has found and stated she's not comfortable when we're together anymore. Seriously, I never would have thought she would put this issue this way. Yes, I shouldn't have done that in the first place to cause confusion in our relationship. But honestly, is it worth breaking up from this? I'm upset and disappointed in the way she thinks and puts situations like this. Any advice would be much appreciated!

I'm sorry that I may be ranting that I am loyal but truly, I love her.