If I can offer my voice - focus on doing some real shit. Don't worry about the career ladder - find experiences where you accomplished some real goals. Getting on the FAANG career ladder too early is probably very limiting. The big differentiator is whether you can take on accountability for making decisions; this requires practice (and luck) => experience.
Don't stress it. People told me this when I was a recent college grad in the mid 2000's. Develop your own heuristic of learning and growing versus stagnating. On the outside-of-FAANG-world, there are so many more opportunities for growth than a kept engineer can imagine.
I can’t help but at chuckle at this with how big a barrier there is in comp between faang and non faang companies. You can get in if you spend months studying again or have a job that legitimately has you using comp sci on a day to day basis but for most folks they are gonna forget the skills needed to get a faang job shortly after college if they don’t get into one
Just keep working towards your goals. When I started out I made a point to work an extra hour or two every day. If there was no work to do, I would study a topic of interest.
Good for you that you made it, but it’s not so trivial a bar that I think telling people to not worry about getting into a faang early in their career is good advice if they care about money or career progression
It matters in the reverse because heavy comp sci tests are what the faangs lean on, on top of all the other interview rounds
Source: I went the process of failing the SWE interview but got an offer as an SRE.
That said, if you already possess this knowledge it could be easier as it takes a bit of the randomness out of getting a LeetCode question that you can’t figure out.
I was just about to schedule my 1st-set whiteboard style interview with the recruiter, which always ends in a flaming disaster, but maybe I should consider their other routes.
I'm a full stack (backend main) software engineer but I'm usually exceptional at fixing server stuff and fully understanding logs to debug problems or find potential exploits through logs or when reading through code reviews. Everyone else I've ever worked with struggles at these things. I can just naturally comprehend other's code / architecture even across technologies.
If there's a career path I can show this in interviews instead of fumbling on even easy LeetCode problems or the other silly things I randomly get stuck on only in interviews, maybe I could actually shine for once.
Depending on the project you work on, you might have a code-heavy project that requires you to work closely with the SWE team, or an operability-heavy project that doesn't have much coding.
Definitely ask your recruiter and have them confirm which track you're interviewing for.
They just have numbers to hit. They will try to drop you into whichever track they need to. If a recruiter ever "seemingly misspoke" and moved you from SWE to SWE-SRE, ask for confirmation and/or insist on interviewing the track you are actually interested in.
I did a bunch of those panels in my time. Imo if you read 2-3 books on unix/linux/networking and can complete this wargame in a couple evenings you’ll stand out quite a bit.
Other than that I was asked to implement a 'tail' command using my familiar language, and explain why deleting a file from disk doesn't free up the space.
Because System deletes only the “pointer” to the file and not the actual file. For the exact same reason, cut+paste is faster than copy+paste
https://www.lacie.com/support/kb/available-disk-space-does-n....
Kirk McKusick's "FreeBSD Kernel Internals" course[1] was recommended to me, and it was excellent. But not cheap at $1495.
An SRE-SE requires a different skill set compared to SRE-SWE or SWE and the interview questions are different. If you have both skill sets, you effectively have two opportunities here :-)
Why do you think this would affect you interviewing as a software engineer?
It's nothing special to those who are OK with leaving 6-figures on the table per anum - or are independently wealthy.
I know the consensus on HN is that FAANG is nothing special (and not that hard to get into!), but for a recent grad with mediocre internships from the pandemic and minimal opportunities for development in the role I'm currently in, getting clout like that on my resume early in my career would be awesome. Here's hoping the slowdowns really don't end up hitting technical roles as hard.