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Comment by scarface74 | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I’m either a cynic or a realist. But in my old age (49) I would tell in CS grad who wanted to optimize their compensation

1. “Grind LeetCode and work for BigTech” (c) r/cscareerquestions

2. Read through the leveling guidelines and figure out the politics of the organization.

3. Get on the right teams so you can show “scope” and “impact”

4. Get good at system design and behavioral interviews while you keep your coding interview chops

5. Diversify your RSUs when they vest and save/invest

6. Job hop when needed

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I think that learning about other roles is a way to significantly mitigate the luck inherently involved in getting "on the right team to show scope and impact".

To be honest, it's very direct and practical advice.

I'd also add that you have to find a way to enjoy what you're doing or none of those points make sense, but being too passionate/involved can also be a mistake if you forget to be smart around the politics and marketing of career advancement.

I don’t know anything about SV or big tech hiring so I’m sure it’s reasonable hiring advice, I don’t know. That said, boy it sounds like a recipe for burnout.

Oh it very much is. I’m 49 and joined BigTech at 46. I recognized that a year in and decided not to play the game.

I found out the minimum I had to do to stay at a mid level role working remotely and actively took myself off of that treadmill and used the extra money to reduce my expenses and save so at anytime I could afford to hop.

Then you joined big tech at the peak of the pandemic boom, when it was completely fair game to for recruiters to be poaching even foreigners due to the outsized growth outlooks. You should be aware that the economic environment has basically taken a 180 since then, and your experience might be very different from someone joining the workforce today with no work experience.

To counter the "cram LC" thing, the issue is that there are plenty of new grads doing exactly that who don't even get past ATS screening. You just don't hear about it much because places like cscq are echo chambers w/ high degrees of survivorship bias and there's qualitative levels of difference to "cramming leetcode" that can't really be captured in online discussions.

Ultimately the generalization seems to be "don't pigeonhole yourself, set yourself apart in some way", which is, IMHO, not exactly a super insightful revelation. That has always been the "smart" way to play the game.

My title is not “software engineer”. I pivoted into “cloud consulting” to get into BigTech. I fell into that role because I do have the combination of skills that the article author spoke of - and I’m an MBA drop out.

But my route was very circuitous and I would never recommend it.

As someone who considers himself a student of organizational behavior and being on the inside informs my viewpoint.

Being that I’m billable. There is a direct line between my work and revenue I generate.

Many of us went through circuitous routes. My title is SWE at a big tech company and I interview SWE candidates, so I think I'm relatively close to how the sausage is made in terms of the pipeline through which most engineering candidates go through to get into big tech.

Personally I think "grind LC" is a very common meme perpetuated by folks on the candidate side, but it lacks a lot of context in terms of how modern big tech interviews are actually done. Focusing exclusively on code, for example, is IMHO, a counter productive way of hyper-focusing. I personally didn't even know what leetcode was when I joined my big tech company, for example. I did well in the loops because they evaluated various other things that I could demonstrate thanks to previous open source work (e.g. community building).

What you're basically seem to be saying is that you fell into big tech thanks to a fortuitously aligned set of previous experiences, as many of us did. But that's the exact opposite of grinding LC as a newbie. Grinding LC is one way of hyper-focusing, and going by the numbers, it's no longer necessarily sufficient to land a big tech job.

I have only been involved in software engineering interviews at BigTech for senior devs in the System Design round (because doing System Design is part of my $DayJob). Just to explain my perspective.

When I was in the real world and when I interviewed at my current job, I practiced being able to explain my experience in STAR format based on my “career document”.

In the real world, all of my “interviews” were mostly just my talking to CxOs and directors at small companies. My loop for my current job was all behavioral after the initial screening and even that was more system design than anything else.

If you know there is going to be a coding interview, wouldn’t it behoove you to practice that too - or “grind leetcode?”

I did DS&A back as part of my job during the first decade of my career bit twiddling in C across multiple architectures and later on maintaining a custom compiler toolchain. But I would definitely have to practice to be interview ready at this point. The coding part of my job has gotten a lot easier during the last decade. It’s been about knowing what to write and getting buy in

> wouldn’t it behoove you to practice that too

I mean, sure, the more you do the merrier. But that goes back to what I was saying: if "unfair advantage" means extracurriculars in high school to get into an ivy league + the ivy league degree to get spotted by recruiters + internships in STAR format on resumes + grinding leetcode + etc etc to increase your chances as much as possible, is any of that really a clever life hack as the "grind LC" meme implies, or is it merely just going way above and beyond what everyone else is able to/willing to put up with in the traditional career path?

If anything, it sounds more like going through a non-traditional career to build up the "street smarts" is the shortcut to big tech riches, given that the alternative is to try to stand out from a sea of millions of resumes all listing C++ and python internships/roles, potentially never landing big tech at all.

Is my impression wrong that the major tech companies will give anyone a chance to do the initial online assessment with a pulse?

OAs aren't super widespread in "elite" companies for a variety of reasons.

One is that sourcing recruiters are not equipped to handle technical screening logistics. They can't tell, for example, if a solution works but has O(n^2) complexity, or if the candidate failed because the tool was being stupid in some way or the question was phrased ambiguously.

Another is that OAs can be gamed much more easily than face-to-face phone screen sessions (see, for example, reports of indian "study" groups).

Another issue is that the evaluation criteria for OAs is often so coarse that it does not provide a reasonable level of filtering, compared to having a combo of a good sourcing team + an engineer "guarding the gate" so to speak via the phone screen session. An engineer's technical screening skill is considered non-automatable enough that companies would fly them into school fairs to vet internship candidates.

Teams may not even trust OAs that they didn't devise themselves, nor have the actual inclination to develop/maintain their own OAs.

OAs also tend to gravitate towards trivia-style quizzes that are often associated w/ "lesser" companies.

There may also be concerns about being respectful of candidates' time.

My impression came from the lack of discernment with the BigTech recruiters I encountered over the past few years. I thought they would give anyone a chance to do at least the initial screening for an SWE role that applied.

- my very light LinkedIn profile showed nothing but a history of working at no name companies and doing CRUD work before 2020 yet I had recruiters reach out to me from Facebook, Apple, Google, MS and I believe Netflix

- I’ve had two internal recruiters reach out to me about “exciting opportunities at Amazon” while my LinkedIn profile clearly showed I worked at AWS.

- I’ve had a recruiter from Facebook reach out to me about a senior engineer position repeatedly even though my LinkedIn byline doesn’t say anything about my being a current software engineer (“cloud consultant specializing in application modernization”)

- I’ve had a recruiter from Google reach out to me about an “engineering manager” position even though I have never managed anyone in my life.

I can't speak for every company, but the impression I get is that recruiters at the FAANGs of the world seem to search for various coarse rubrics that may or may not correlate with whatever they are looking for, be it a high number of years of experience as a potential correlation to seniority or certain keywords as correlation for expertise in some subject matter. "Cloud" and derivative keywords are probably the ones landing your linkedin profile in the search results of these recruiters.

Not everyone is getting recruiter spam because not all keywords are created equal and not all profiles look promising, but those of us who do get spammed, get a fair amount of it.

The Amazon recruiter spam in particular is bad enough to be a running joke.

AI might make this advice outdated, if AI is able to handle a decent chunk of common coding tasks then the people who understand business impact and where to focus efforts will be the most valuable engineers, not the leetcode grinders. Google's huge issue with launching stuff nobody wants and then shutting it down is a prime example of what happens when you keep rewarding algorithm/CS specialists over engineers who dedicated time to other things

Actually I think that is more of an issue with Google's MBA and Product/Project manager culture than rewarding algorithm/CS specialists

This is all solid advice but seems to be unrelated to gaining an unfair advantage.

I interpret "unfair advantage" to be more about employability and how valuable you are in the field (starting with inside the business you are in) and not about putting more money in your pocket.

My value to my last company - - a 60 person startup where I was a senior software engineer /the de facto “cloud architect” - was much greater than it is at the second largest employer in the US.

But, if your goal is to exchange your labor for as much money as you can, you optimize for what can get you the highest compensation based on your skillset and path dependencies - family obligations, desires, etc

There's nothing wrong with this list, but if you also (7) Get into a position where Sales & Marketing look at you as someone valuable, you'll end up far more successful than you would otherwise.

You eventually have to do that to show “scope” and “impact”. That’s true.

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