Who gets invited to the party?

Re:Who gets invited to the party? by taude on Friday July 24, 2020 @10:07AM (#23939664)

I think on the engineering side it's different. the interview process is the gatekeeping and FAANG companies are totally open to interviewing anyone who thinks they can get through the process. Your ability to climb into Sr leadership might be impacted, if that's the direction you want to go, but you can absolutely prove yourself in engineering.

Also, I like your point about CSU. I do a lot of hiring in the Boston area, and we have so many "second-tier" schools who produce absolutely excellent SEs. It might be trickle-down because of MIT here. Don't get me wrong, definitely hire MIT, but we also cherry-pick from Northeastern, WPI (my favorite), etc. with equally as good results.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Who gets invited to the party? by scarface74 on Saturday July 25, 2020 @01:04AM (#23946974)

For someone who was just starting out and went to a no name college (no insult intended - I did), what signals would a FAANG company have that you are even worth their time interviewing?

I graduated in the mid 90s so I really don’t have a frame of reference. But, hypothetically speaking, if I had graduated in 2012 from the same no name college but spent a lot of time “grinding leetCode” and had the technical altitude to do well in the interview would they have even given me a chance?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Who gets invited to the party? by ido on Saturday July 25, 2020 @06:29AM (#23948079)

I also went to a good but unknown school and was recruited by Amazon and Google. As far as I can tell it was purely due to applicable work experience (which I got working in companies you never heard of).

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Who gets invited to the party? by scarface74 on Saturday July 25, 2020 @07:49AM (#23948492)

No one is arguing that once you have your first job, what college you went to matters. If you can get that first job, then only experience matters.

Heck on my very sparse LinkedIn profile, it basically showed me as an enterprise C# CRUD developer and recruiters were reaching out to me from Facebook and Google even though I wouldn’t get through the first fifteen minutes of a technical phone screen for either without at least six months to a year of prep. Recruiters throw out a wide net.

That being said, after the local market tanked post Covid, and my unknown company with less than 50 people all in did an across the board pay cut, I threw a Hail Mary and applied for a remote job as a consultant for AWS. I had the experience and I knew it was going to be a remote interview so I took a chance and got in.

But would they have recruited interns from my no name college - even if I did try to give them some type of signal like side projects and an AWS cert?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Who gets invited to the party? by ido on Saturday July 25, 2020 @08:15AM (#23948625)

No clue, but these recent grads can instead get a job at a less prestigious company & apply to the lucrative ones after they have a few years' xp.

Here in Berlin it seems the market for developers is as strong as ever, regardless of Corona.

[ Parent | on HN ]