One thing to consider is the runaway stock market. It has a huge effect on total comp. Yes, Amazon has lower base salaries than FB/GOOG, but they've always been pretty generous with RSUs and their stock is damn high right now. There are no doubt many engineers there making those $400k figures by virtue of having been granted RSUs when they were half as valuable as they are today. It may take a true outlier to get hired today and immediately be making that kind of salary, but it doesn't take much of an outlier for someone with a few years of grants to get that high.

> Yes, Amazon has lower base salaries than FB/GOOG, but they've always been pretty generous with RSUs and their stock is damn high right now.

Actually my salary was very similar at Amazon when compared with Google and my friends have similar salaries. The problem with Amazon is that their vesting schedule is very heavily weighted towards the 3rd and fourth year.

It's true that if you stay the entire time, that might work to your benefit since by that time the stock value may have increased greatly, but I'm not sure how much that should count since you could in theory just sell your RSUs and buy Amazon stocks if you wanted to.

My experience is that total comp at Google is much higher than Amazon but again this may be anecdotal?

I keep hearing about the FAANG companies and I have to wonder what can I do to make my proactiveness pay off in getting into the running for job interviews? I feel like it's easier to get their attention as a CS student seeking internships than as a self-taught mid-level developer (which I am).

I have interviewed on two separate occasions by Amazon, and only contacted by Microsoft (submitted some forms, but they never called me back). Both times, it was from an internal recruiter making first contact with me. But when I try to reach out to them first (applications or LinkedIn), nobody answers.

Are these FAANG companies usually recruiting candidates on the basis of "don't contact us, we'll decide if we want to contact you"? Other than knowing an acquaintance that works in the company I see no other way to get into an interview more quickly.

The signal to noise ratio in the hiring process is horrible. I work at one of the FAANG companies and do a lot in the hiring process. I can tell you that getting a phone screen off of a resume that you submit is a crap-shoot. There are people applying to positions they aren’t qualified for, people applying to positions they have no idea what the role is (blast a bunch of resumes out and see what sticks), and genuinely qualified people who suck at writing a resume (and probably go unnoticed as a result). As a result, there are probably a lot of good candidates that don’t even get looked at because they are lost among the noise.

My best advice is find someone who can submit your resume as an internal referral. Those carry a lot more weight (at least where I work). However, make sure that person is someone you know and is comfortable “vouching” for you. These referrals are looked at more favorably since the thinking is that it’s somewhat of a known quantity.

I can only speak from my experience with Amazon. I sent a resume in for a job at Lab126 since I'm an embedded guy with an EE background, no CS except 21 years doing embedded software. I never heard from Lab126, but the AWS team got back to me. After failing to pass all the test vectors of the coding test, they gave me a phone interview. I did OK at best. They flew me up for an interview and proceeded to ask me CS algorithm questions on a whiteboard for 6 hours. I didn't get the job(and probably would have turned it down otherwise, since it involved being on-call), but it surprised me that their screening process was so bad. Nowhere on my resume did I indicate having any knowledge of CS algorithms, yet it was seemingly vital for the role. Strangely enough, I did study up on virtualization implementations(KVM/Xen), but no one asked me a single question about that(despite it being listed as vital on the job description).

No, they're voracious recruiting machines. It is certainly possible to get hired by writing into a webform; it's not a particularly effective way relative to others, but it works enough to justify them sending those leads to recruiters.

Other than knowing an acquaintance that works in the company I see no other way to get into an interview more quickly. You should certainly cultivate an internal advocate. In no circumstance will that be worse than applying cold; it will often be better.

The Foobar coding challenge seems to work really for Google, for whatever reason.

Go to Google and search "python list comprehension" in a bunch of different tabs. Make sure it's exactly that. If you have an extra 's', or if you do "list comprehension python", it's not gonna work.

If you go through the first 3 levels, then they'll ask you to send in a resume.

Admittedly, I only know results from the perspective of students, but I know several people who were initially rejected that got callbacks after finishing Foobar.

In 2018, this is kind of sad, judicious combinations of generator expressions and list comprehensions is so much more interesting (use lazy and eager evaluation where it matters)!

Anyway, I did that search in 20 tabs and didn't get anything.

Start closing them pretty fast and this will pop up.

https://imgur.com/a/XMt7PAq

ISTR that only works from the USA.

That explains it.

Unless you make a name for yourself somehow, the best way to get recruited to FAANG's is to get hired for a summer internship, perform well, and then get hired. Another way is to attend the job fairs at your Uni and see if you can score an interview.

I wouldn't worry too much about getting into them though. SE's are in high demand across the Valley; expand your horizons and interview with some of the late stage startups and other SE companies as well (e.g. Atlassian). They will provide amazing compensation as well as being a smaller company where you can have a bigger impact. Once you build a few years of experience delivering products, your problem will be rejecting 99% of the recruiters that reach out to you lol.

Seriously as a CS student, you really just have to get a job where you can learn and write actual code and watch your career soar.

FAANGs receive massive volume of applications, so it can be very difficult to receive a call back from a recruiter. I had a Facebook recruiter tell me that their acceptance rate is "way lower than Stanford", which, if you think about it is not that surprising. Anyways, the best way to get a call from Google or Facebooks is to find someone to refer you.

A startup is a good place to accelerate yourself to an L5 somewhere else.

If you are on a team of n<10 responsible for keeping a company/product alive you tend to learn a lot more than if you're on a team of n>1000.

True in some regards, but it’s also incredibly easy to learn how to do things the wrong way, if you have no one to learn from.

>but it’s also incredibly easy to learn how to do things the wrong way, if you have no one to learn from

Yep, say hello to startups who go cheap by outsourcing to developers who are not as good in their craft or don't care about learning more.

These startups also don't stay in business for very long ;)

I guess I might phrase it something like, if you're going to make L5 it is probably the result of excessive competence. If that is you, you will get their faster cutting your teeth in at least a few different startups. Develop judgement and a variety of experiences.