'How to Get a Job at the Big 4 - Amazon, Facebook, Google & Microsoft' by Sean Lee

there's going to be a short presentation on how you can get a job at Microsoft Amazon Google and or Facebook and from here on out here and I will just refer to those companies as big for some people might say Apple should be on the list instead of maybe Facebook and you know if you're an electrical engineering that's fair but you'll see that the advice from this presentation will generally apply to basically all Silicon Valley tech companies so just a quick survey how many of you actually worked at one of the big force right why are you here okay maybe you worked at I don't know maybe you worked at Microsoft but you still wanted to get a job at Google I don't know I noticed a lot of you put Google as your dream company in our Facebook poll my name is Shawn Lee and I've interned at two of the big four and I've had many friends come up to me and ask me for tips and advice on how they can do the same so I realized that even though all of the big four you know they have info sessions at UBC there's never been a more general guide that applies to all of them and there should be because the process of getting a job at Microsoft it's not that different from getting a job at Facebook process of getting a job at Google right not that different from Amazon so I thought I'd talk like this needs to be done and it needs to be done from a student's perspective something really honest and straightforward because that's an element often missing in the talks that are given by the companies when they're representing themselves and so because of that disclaimer before we start I'm not a representative of any of these companies I'm just currently a student like all of you and you know the things I talked about today will admittedly be anecdotal but I guarantee you if you do the things that I say today you'll be able to land a big job in a big company in a year whether it's Google Microsoft Facebook Amazon Twitter Apple right whatever so these are some of the companies I've interviewed with over the last few years now all of the big four is on there obviously and these are the companies that I've interned at Nvidia 2013 summer I was on 2014 summer and Facebook fall of 2014 so I think I have a fair amount of interview experience and I'm sure there are more experienced and smarter people that should be giving this talk instead of me but I really wanted to help out people who are new to the interviewing game and don't even know where to start because you know I I know the struggle so before we get into the main discussion though I wanted to talk about why-why-why specifically the big four right cuz there are plenty of other amazing companies out there and I'm not talking about the idealistic reasons like oh you wanna you wanna have big impact right but you want you you want to learn a lot I'm just talking about it in terms of like your career development so first is brand equity right Microsoft Amazon Google Facebook these are all names that recruiters have hauled all heard of right so and and they're they're very well known for their pay their pert the prestige and most importantly the difficulty of their technical interview so anybody who's worked at one of these companies right anybody who's got one of these companies listed on their resume they get a stamp that says I'm at least it's good but which of the big four should you go to and the truth is when it comes down to choosing between the four I don't think it matters very much right okay sure you get free food at Google and Facebook where Amazon has the perk of letting you live in downtown Seattle Microsoft is Microsoft I you know I've never worked I've never worked at Microsoft so I can't say right but but you are going to these companies to eat free food right hopefully not I mean what's important is here's the most important thing is what you're going to be doing for the eight hours you're going to work every day it's your team it's your project it's your manager so I say once you've worked at any of these companies it becomes way easier to get an interview with any of the other three so don't obsess over Google over Facebook or Amazon or Microsoft or wherever and besides right you're not gonna you're not gonna stay at one company for the rest of your life and then there's the fact that even if you don't really like the companies it's easier to start from the big four and then move to a smaller company than the other way around because again of that I'm at least as good stamp on your resume now that not to say that there aren't smaller companies that aren't just as competitive or be more so like companies like Dropbox snapchat kora Palantir and other really hot Silicon Valley tech companies they're known to have extremely high bars for their technical interviews and appropriately so like does anybody want to guess like how much Dropbox paid their interns nobody wants to guess more somebody else more lower than time so yeah what I've seen on Glassdoor is 9,000 a month which is pretty ridiculous for an intern snapchat I heard also pace 9,000 a month kora 8200 a month is it Zynga pays 8,000 to actually so which brings me to my second point which is paid this is something companies when they you know reps and themselves on the stage they won't tell you exactly and I can't I can't tell you like cuz I can't tell you exactly like what the numbers are I don't know myself then for you know what I got paid I shouldn't mention it but you can look up the numbers on Glassdoor Kong and I should give you a pretty good idea I think all of the intern salaries at the big four is at least five thousand a month and that varies depending on your experience and the position so get an internship at any one of these four companies and there's your full tuition right I think the average co-op student at UBC at least in Kansai and I think I heard that they make something in the two thousands a month so this is a big step up but again there are companies like I mentioned that pay even more out there so so why the big four and here's the thing about the big four right versus the smaller companies because because of their size they don't hire iOS developers or or front-end developers they just hire software engineers because there's no really reason to differentiate them for entry-level positions so if you know Java and that's all you know but you're hell of an engineer with Java they'll have a position for you if you know Python and that's all you know they'll have a position for you and if you know Ruby and that's all you know but they don't have a position for you chances are they'll make a position for you right languages languages guys can actually be taught fairly quickly but the same can't be said about fundamental computer science concepts right the way you think as a programmer your reading skills your logic your communication skills that can't be taught over now I didn't know any PHP when I started at Facebook and to be honest I still don't but that's that's all I did there the industry is really good right now and and a big border they're desperate desperate for a great quarter right they're always hiring and due to their size they also have more resources to hire more people more open positions more recruiters more outreach so this this is sort of anecdotal but I've personally had way better success rates with the big four than the local companies in Vancouver is at least as far as getting the interview goes so I'd like to make the argument that as long as you're a smart person that knows how to code it's easier to get a job at the big four than the smaller companies who might be looking for you know people who have a little bit more specific skill sets so if you didn't want to work at the big four prior to coming here I don't know why you're here but hopefully you're convinced now so how can you get a job at the big four well it's actually quite simple and after years of interviewing I think I've finally cracked it right I've advised the idiots guide to getting a job at the big four and it's real simple okay real simple I broke it down into two stuff for you okay step one is get an interview somehow okay and step two is do well on the interview okay I know I know I know I know I know okay so most of you are sitting here thinking well done wasn't that obvious what a waste of time it was to show up but but listen to me carefully like that's just a thing that's just a thing it is obvious it is obvious so why do I have so many people coming up to me asking for advice as if there was some secret trick to it or something I said it's simple I didn't say it was easy bullet let's pick this down right so let's talk about step 1 get an interview somehow so to get an interview to have to apply what a resume but what was on your resume so here's mine I can't tell you objectively if it's a great resume or not because you know I'm biased but it succeeded in me getting jobs so I guess this season and you know I better to use mind them someone else's I've seen way too many students with two-page resumes and they don't even have a single single year old relevant work experience and that's not to say that you're working part-time at Starbucks to you know help pay your tuition is a bad thing in fact if you don't have any other work experience definitely leave it in but your resume shouldn't be two pages long your recruiter will probably spend a few seconds 10 seconds maybe tops spending you know time on your resume because remember like they have hundreds of applications to sift through so every single line every single character should deliberately answer the question why should we hire this person I think I do a pretty good job of doing that here I don't just talk about what I did or my what my responsibilities were but I I talk about the impact I had that company you know quantitative that's measurable like reducing daily error rate by 75% or improving startup time by up to 10 seconds and if you're curious why Amazon section is blank still under a nondisclosure agreement so here's a bottom half of my resume what if you don't have any works appearance we all have to start somewhere of course and the recurrence they do understand that right otherwise nobody would have jobs and I gotta tell you I think we're really lucky to live in a time when the laptops we carry around with us is just as good as the laptops that professional software engineers will be using at work right you can't say the same for a lot of the other industries so what's stopping us from working on personal projects or contributing to open source projects right the answer is nothing of course but what should your personal project be that's that's the question I get a lot well it's whatever you want it to be right what do you want to do where do you where do you see yourself going with your career if you want to work on the front page of amazon.com design and make your own beautiful webpage and it can be your online portfolio if you want to work on Microsoft Xbox team make a video game for Xbox if you want to work on Google's Android OS contribute something it's open-source right and if you want to work on Facebook's mobile app then make your own iOS app or Android app now there's literally nothing stopping you from doing this right now so I say just do what you want put it on your github and then you know put your github on your resume on your LinkedIn now you have experience and stuff to put on your resume also working on side projects that shows the recruiters that you're really passionate about what you do right now if you don't have the discipline to set aside time to work on your side projects you know consistent consistently under a great way you can participate participate in a hackathon how many of you here we're at global Game Jam this year right so this is our first problem not very many now that's a great way to produce something that's working over a weekend right because now you're you're an artificially constrained amount of time but the pressure is not all on you because you have a team so you'll learn a lot and you also meet a lot of new people so participate in as many accidents as you can anybody here know who John Carmack is okay who's John Carmack yeah so right now he's the CTO of oculus VR right you guys heard of that company oculus okay oculus VR was a virtual reality company Facebook bought it last year for two billion dollars and John Carmack is a CT of that in all he's also the guy who made do him along with John Romero he tweeted this recently he didn't write it but he just tweeted as a food for thought let me just read it out the ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was divided the class into two groups all those on the left side of the studio he said would be created solely on the quantity of the work they produced all those on the right solely on the quality his procedure was simple on the final day of class he would bring him his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the quantity group 50 pounds of 50 pounds of Padre didn't a 50 pounds of B and so on there was being greater on quality however needed to produce only one pot or B at a perfect one to get a name well came grading time and a curious fact emerged the works of highest quality were all produced by group being graded for quantity it seems that well the quality quantity group was busily churning out piles of work and learning from their mistakes the quality group had set theory and theorizing about perfection and in the end had a little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theory theories and a pile of that clay something to think about it'll take a lot of work until your personal projects reaches a level of quality that you'll be happy with you may never be happy with it and and I hope you aren't to be frank you may go through several projects before you finally you know produce something that you're proud of to add to your portfolio and I understand it might be daunting but today I want to challenge you all to something okay I'm gonna challenge of all who here has heard of Jennifer Dewalt nobody okay so she's a person that made one website every day for half a year hmm and not to not to imply what the Walt did is nothing short of amazing but if she could make hundred eighty websites in 180 days without any coding background beforehand I'm sure right I'm sure computer science students and engineering students at a top forty school can at least make an Android applications in a few months so I challenge you today make something make something and break some pots along the way next week to put on your resume this programming languages list technologies you know how to use if you have no relevant work experience listen course worse by the way if your GPA is anything less than a 3.0 leave it out of your resume I think even 3.0 is probably a little low but you know it's okay the truth is companies they don't really care about your GP anymore right Google they were notorious for for for asking for your GPA but even they've come out and said that they found no correlation between performance at work and school GPA they will still ask for it though I guess for data collection purposes to continue confirming their hypothesis okay so with that we have a resume you can either apply online or you can hand in your resume at the career fair and now I apologize that it's already March because I really wanted to do this presentation earlier but you know hesitated for a long time so it's probably too late to apply for a summer internship but there is always fall internships and that's an option I think even if you're not in the co-op program just take a leave of absence from school for a term or a year that's actually what I did to internet Facebook was it was during it was during September right once I had an offer from both Amazon and Facebook I had to ask myself like was it more important to me to graduate four months earlier or to work at both of these companies because even if I graduate if I don't have a full time offer right what does it matter so I two chances to get a return offer to opportunities work in two different companies two very different teams so that's what I did now I'm not sure if engineering program is as flexible as science so that you can just you know leave for a term but anyways apply for a fall internship if you can't there's always next year and of course if you're graduating this restriction doesn't apply to you so just apply just apply to these companies it's free right but you can't get that interview unless you apply for cover letters I don't encourage nor discourage them I doubt recruiters at big four have time to read them if they only spend several seconds looking at your resume but if you're applying to a smaller company right maybe snapchat or something and you're really passionate about snapchat you know that might make a difference okay here's something a little bit more unconventional I'm sure you've known my resume of course companies don't tell you this often for some reason but another way to get interviews or programming challenges so who here has heard of twitch okay you yes Yeah right so they're the they're the video game streaming website and Amazon actually bought them last year for a billion dollars right so I was able to get an interview with twitch because they had a coding challenge that asked me to write an AI that played a bidding game and it would run your AI against all the other submissions and I wrote a simple program that and and they allowed unlimited number of submissions so I kept on adjusting it until I was ranked like 20 seconds out of 400 something submissions once I decided this is probably good enough I sent in an application in this case I sent in a couple letter to and I mentioned hey I'm the dude in 22nd place sure enough they gave me an interview anyone here heard of box okay what does box ooh sorry yeah so there's similar to Dropbox I'm sure most of you've heard of Dropbox at least box has a more of a enterprise focus and they recently a type II oh right for now I think they're worth 2.2 billion dollars so they had a few challenges on interview Street and one of them was like implement an LRU cache I solved it and got an interview now even if I don't get the job offer or the interview I consider it good practice right Evernote for example a lot of you probably heard of Evernote as well they never gave you an interview after I solved all the challenges and you know that's that's no big deal because now I have an implementation of a circularbuffer I can put on my resume our way to get an interview at the big four is a referral if you know someone that works at the big four not me though ask them nicely I'll give you a referral cuz as long as they don't hate you and they think you have a pretty good chance they'll likely agree because there's a big incentive for them they get a they get a referral bonus I gave some of my friends referrals at Facebook and a few of them got hired and that was a significant chunk of change so very big incentive for them and not only that but the company is right they understand they understand this they understand that candidates they find through referrals statistically have a much higher chance of getting hired take a look at this Stanford acceptance rate 5.1 percent that's actually not that bad right that's one out of twenty for Google you know many estimates out there but this source that I listed it says 0.23% that's one out of four hundred thirty so that's twenty one point five times harder than Stanford but the good news is this number is much much higher for candidates that have been referred and the recruiters they know this and because the recruiters they get bonuses when they successfully hire someone obviously they'll pursue the candidates that have a higher chance of getting hired right so getting a referral should at least guarantee that your resume is actually looked at by an actual person and it dramatically increases your chances of getting an interview and of course you know both option two and three you do need to apply what a resume in the end that's step one applies to everything so that's step one let's talk about stuck too so a week later after you apply you'll get an email saying you know we want to schedule an interview what should you expect all the big four they're usually on campus to do on-site interviews after career first because that's when they get a bunch of applications so you can expect to do some coding in person either on paper or more usually I like white whiteboard of course depending on the timing if there aren't any interviewers or recruiters on campus at the time all the companies will interview you over the phone and something like they'll use something like collab at it for the code or in case of Google and they'll use Google Docs for internships Amazon and Google they do 45-minute back-to-back interviews Facebook they do one 45-minute interview and if you make it through they'll fly you out to their California or more likely the Seattle office since you know we're at UVC for one more 45 minute on-site interview and they'll give you a tour of the campus as well Microsoft you know similar they come to our campus to a 45-minute interview and if you pass the fly out to Redmond but unlike Facebook they do four back-to-back 45min interviews for google if you make it through the phone interviews they'll set you up with hosts matching interviews so you end up on the team that you actually you know like to work on this means though that even if you did really well on your coding interviews there is a good chance that you might not get the job if you didn't want any of the teams or none of the teams wanted you Amazon Facebook and Microsoft the last four your preferences and do their best to match up with a team that you'd like but you really don't have the final say but it does mean that you're guaranteed the job as long as you pass the corning interviews four full times all four companies very similar processes it's one or two 45-minute phone screen and then for back-to-back 45-minute interviews on the campus what other lunch break in between usually okay but what will they ask you during these interviews if you went through the coop interviews how many of you are in kua okay if you went through the coop interviews or or interviews with some of the local companies in Vancouver let me tell you first of all that it'll probably be nothing like that the big four and tech companies in Silicon Valley will all be spending 80 to 100 percent of the time asking coding questions so I hope you guys all have a pen or something cuz you need to write the sound there are there are two Bibles there are two Bibles of programming interviews right number one is cracking the coding interview CT CI and number two is programming interview expose or or PI so cracking the coding interview in my opinion that's the by far the best resource for interview prep it's basically a bunch of interview questions and they have solutions detail solutions at the back so in the past I've actually been asked questions right out of this book a few times if you feel comfortable with your data structure and algorithms you can dive right into CT CI but if you're new to interviews and you want to review some fundamental concepts first I recommend starting out with PI since it goes into more detail explanations skip any sections about brain teasers nobody asked those anymore they're useless Google used to be notorious for asking them and you know they found that it is it doesn't help predicting a candidate's performance at work no don't pay attention to those do not skip sections about objective object-oriented programming design what I would say don't focus too much time on them because for interns and new new grad hires you know they usually want to know if you just know how to code but you know you you will get design questions for sure I'm just saying the focus is still on coding and so on that note everybody should do all the sections about data structures and algorithms like arrays trees recursion sorting out whatnot but for sections like networking and databases you have to use your own discretion they probably won't ask you like a database question if you didn't have SQL on your resume and you're applying for a position to write firmware and C right so the other thing is I've entered with with you know all of the big for multiple times and I've never been asked behavioral questions the behavioral question I guess is the entirety of the interview here your tone your mannerisms your body language your communication skills throughout the entire interview and as long as it doesn't raise a huge red flag like you said something really offensive you know you'll be okay because again to 90% of the focus is on can you code depending on the company the question will either be decided at the discretion of the interviewer or the company will have a list of questions that are in rotations that the interviewer may ask so born Glassdoor calm or a career cup and look up interview questions that were asked for the position you're applying for recently because if somebody broke their NDA and decided to post their questions on there you might get lucky and be asked the same one but if not they still could practice and but I wouldn't prioritize these questions over the ones in CTC I because again there aren't detail solutions for you to work with I personally really like Lee code they have solutions to most of the questions they have up on there and I'd say on average they're actually more challenging than the ones I found in CTC I so it's excellent practice hacker ranked top quarter geeks for geeks they're all very similar in function you can pick and solve a coding problem on your computer online but for the purposes of preparing your interviews you really want to get used to whiteboard coding not keyboard because that'll likely be the format of your your technical interviews but of course if you exhaust all other sources check it out or if you just you know like doing this kind of thing now the key is this the key is this how you're going to practice these questions if it's at all possible what I don't want you to be doing is sitting down and phone encoding these by yourself out of all the things I'm going to be saying today if all of it so far was information you already knew this is the one thing you should really take away okay this method of interview prep really works it really works but what I want you to do is you want I want you to find a friend right or two I don't think anything bigger than a group of three will work because too many ideas and distractions it'll start to get in the way too ideally three max and try to find people who are you know around your level of experience so you all benefit equally the day before you mean you guys all solve a coding problem first different ones from any of the sources I might have mentioned make sure you understand this thoroughly and then when you meet one of you acts as the interviewer and then the other acts as the interviewee your job as the interviewee is to solve the problem obviously asks any questions to remove the ambiguities like what could the entropy make sure you talk to problem over and discuss high-level approach before you start writing any code make sure you're unseating what you're thinking along the way explaining why you're doing it the way you are doing as you write down code your job as the interviewer it isn't to go against them but it's to pick their head for what they know and poke them gently in the right direction if they get really lost this is what we all interviewers will do now these mock interviews they're not only important because you know it's it's practice of the real thing but now because you're on the other side of the fence and what you realize you'll quickly realize is that the best solution to a problem is not the fastest one it's not the simplest one but the one that the interviewer already thinks is the best solution now the one the solution that the interviewer knows of course it'll most usually be the best one but not always and that is confirmation by us the interviewers are trained not to not to be biased of course but their day job as engineers right interviewing is their sight thing and and you have to remember they're humans just like you so if you're asked to print all possible permutations or they string you decide to do it iteratively the interviewer will probably ask can you do this any other way now of course you can do this literally but what's the simpler way can anybody shout it up Rickerson right so it works but if the interviewer was expecting the recursive solution that's the one you should give if he asked you if it's possible to do it any other way it's big hint you need to do it other way now if you know an objectively better way to do it I don't know maybe it's faster you know Big O because of some crazy algorithm you learned and Comp Sci 420 or whatever right mention that I mention that but unless you understand it well enough to teach it to the interviewer yourself he probably won't be convinced that you know what you're talking about now just do these mock interviews for an hour or two three or four times a week and it starts to get fun to blow through all the questions and you'll gain more confidence as you start to pick up momentum and now this is what happens right what happens is once you master a question this is what you ask a question you get a boom right and you get a letter not boom and some people they're better at this than others of course but no matter who you are no matter who you are once you have enough of these thoughts it becomes trivial to connect them let me give you an example what I'm talking about any sort of question like finding if two strings or anagrams finding out if two strings or anagrams of each other finding the intersections of two lists or finding duplicates in an array they all follow the same pattern you do brute force and that's o N squared running time with oh one memory you saw it that's om log n running time with all one or all log and memory usage depending on what sorting algorithm you use and you can use a hash table and that's a when memory with Oh N or n running time with a one memory now depending on whether you're in a memory constrained environment or not you'd probably say that the best answer is the hash table approach or the sorting approach and you'll be writing i've been asked so many questions that follow this pattern for my interviews they cup the companies involve asking this for entry-level positions or back to that permutation of string example right maybe instead of all permutation now they're saying all permutations of length n where n is less than the length of the original string or maybe not all permutation but now they want all combinations right because the order doesn't matter you may have never done a question like that before but if you did the string permutation and you've understood it thoroughly you'd be able to immediately recognize this is a recursion problem and go from there that's up to maybe some of you came to this event hoping for some easy tricks to get a job at the big four it doesn't exist right there is no such thing but there is an easy trick to get a full time job at the big four and as you go through the easier internships right you saw like how the full time is all for back to back 45 minute interviews so you go through the easier internship interviews and you work your ass off and you get a return offer the only exception to that is actually Google they'll make you do another interview at the end of your internship if you want a return offer I told you it's simple but it's not easy and that's the good news because if it was easy everybody will be making six figures right everybody would be at the big big four making six figures but I can tell you if I look at my friends that went to the big four last year and the ones that didn't what separated them from the others was that they were doing the mock interview practice sessions regularly so let's survey the room right how many of you have never applied to the big four there's your problem step one you have to get the interview and to get the interview you have to apply I want to ask how many of you have actually applied you've interviewed and you've been rejected hope you four more of you here but I guess not and that is step two right it comes out to more practice but here's the thing write this about step one step two it's deceiving because they're not two separate steps they're not two separate sets that go from one to two it's part of your life and and this you're always working on them at the same time right you're always working on your resume your or we're always working on personal projects you're always practicing this isn't school anymore guys right it's not about school anymore when you walk into that interview and once the 45 minutes are up there is no 60% there is no 70% there is no 80% right there is higher or no higher Apple listen to me carefully the interviewer they can limit you to 45 minutes but they can't limit how much you prepare beforehand if you look at professional athletes right huh they're not going oh I got a I got a big game scheduled next week I got to start chaining no no no no no training is part of their job and I'm telling you if you're a student right now and you want to become a software engineer you want to become a software developer you got a train you got to start training you got to start practicing that's your job so the story time let me let me tell you let me tell you a story about my friend Mike is he here today Mike hey Mike I gotta talk about you for a second Mike because Heat Mike he went on he went on some poor turns before and you know they weren't really programming jobs right and last year around January he saw me he saw me doing these these interview prep sessions and I invited him over to my place because I had a white board at home and and we just started doing these mock interviews together and then when the career fair rolled around we probably both applied to like 30 or 40 different companies and because I already worked at Nvidia right that's that's a pretty big name I didn't have any any problem getting the interviews but he was getting discouraged you know cuz because he wasn't getting anything and I told Mike like like Mike like you can't get discouraged like this preparation this preparation we're doing right now it isn't for a specific event it isn't for a specific interview right this is just this is part of our lives now if you get nothing this year you're just preparing for next year and guess what happened Amazon was on campus that week I think I think there were our there Wednesday and Thursday and on Tuesday one of the recruiters called him and said we got an interview slot that just feet up do you want do you want to interview with us you know I guess I guess Mike was on the bottom of the stack or whatever because I had that interview two weeks earlier but anyway he you know he said he had class but he said of course of course I do the interview and you know what happened last summer Mike and I we both went Amazon together and we'll be returning there to summer or August for full time now Mike's a smart guy but I think he would agree right if he didn't keep up with those mock interview sessions even when he didn't have a new interview schedule he might not have made the cut listen to them listen to what I'm saying carefully like if you start preparing after you get the interview scheduled you might already be too late my friend Seong is here to say yeah he didn't really have any big renowned companies prior to 2014 okay what we did the same thing we met we met twice a week we did interview prep sessions you know for about two hours a day and then he got Amazon and then he got a thinking ape that's probably one of the hardest companies to get into in Vancouver and he's returning to Facebook to summer his feet here right see see my boy man he didn't have any job prior to 2014 right he skipped the midterm just so that he can do nothing but prep for the interview with Amazon like non-stop and he's he's entered there last summer and he's going back there full-time now I'm not saying like skip your midterms that that was not ideal but I'm saying you need to be able to make some sacrifices if you really want that job that's the kind of attitude you need to have now if you still don't think you have what it takes to get a job at the big four if you still don't believe what I'm telling you today let me let me just be honest with you right now okay for real I'm probably the I'm probably the dumbest person in this room like how many of you took on flight 221 right what's the electrical engineering what was the equivalent of that somebody just yell it out okay so you all know what I'm talking about yeah okay I didn't know I didn't know there was an equivalent okay so you all know what I'm talking about that that basic algorithms and data structure course right that's what basically all the interview questions are based on I failed that course and I took it again and I pass with a 51% how many of you took a comp site 310 what's the I don't know again I don't know what's the equivalent of that but that's the software engineering course right yeah somebody's yell it out place so we all know what I'm talking about okay the software engineering course like that that's not my job title right that's my job title and I failed that course to my GPA my GPA is 2.3 I've been on academic probation for the last four years I got rejected from the court program and when I graduate this may it'll be taking me six years to get a four-year degree okay like like I've had people coming up to me telling me like oh they're jealous the gel is but they don't know right like there was a time in my life there was a time in my life like I skipped two classes for two weeks so that I can just do these interview preps and like nobody wanted to do that much interview prep right so like I talked to you I talked to Mike and I was like Mike you're gonna be the Monday and Wednesday guy and say I'm you be the Tuesday and the thursday guy and Chris you'll be the Friday guy okay it took me five rejections with the big four before I finally got a job with them and I'm not I'm not talking about like I don't even count the times I applied and I never heard back I'm talking about I went in I interviewed and they told me I'm not good enough but here's the great thing about resumes right here's a great thing about resumes you don't need to put down how many times you failed on your resume so if you're that crazy good russian programmer guy in your class and you can get a job offer but all little bit big for in a single try and you're like me you're an idiot like me and you took you five tries it doesn't matter our resumes look the same you don't have to put down how many times you fail on your resume remember that Steve Jobs speech at Stanford and at the end he he mentioned the code stay hungry stay foolish if you feel stupid in class right now because all of the stuff you're learning none of it makes sense know that this is an advantage okay be foolish enough to dare to think you can work at the top companies in the world it doesn't matter if your GPA is 2.3 doesn't matter if you've never had a job before all of my friends myself included we we never had a reason to think that we can work at the top company in the world but we were all foolish and we were hungry not to try anyways and then we got it so listen to me like I don't I don't I only have only about seven minutes left before but before I leave you if I leave you I know I know that the career fair is done and over with and and some of you sitting in this room you know you're here because you interviewed with them you've interviewed them last month and and and you thought it was too hard right and and you discouraged and you're thinking of giving up and I'm saying like don't be discouraged luck luck plays a really big role in introduce okay sometimes you get an interviewer that's really good if you'll he'll guide you in the right direction without giving up giving away in the answers sometimes you'll get the ones that just sound like they sit there checking email you might have been - you might have been really anxious you might have been sick you might have never seen any like a question anything like that before and you just choked or maybe you were everything they were looking for but they just had other people with more experience that happened to have applied around the time when you applied now don't get me wrong I'm not saying skill doesn't matter I'm not saying skill doesn't matter but skill only improves your luck and the easiest way to improve your luck is to keep applying keep practicing and keep interviewing good luck and thank you all so much for your time today you

Channel: SJ Tech

Views: 1,404,395

Rating: 4.9349875 out of 5

Keywords: google, facebook, amazon, microsoft, apple, software, engineering, software engineering, engineer, tech, technology, programming, programmer, program, motivational, How-to (Website Category), big 4, company, job search, new grad, software engineer, technical interview, interview, interview tips, resume, cs, computer science, computer engineering, coding, Amazon.com (Venture Funded Company), Microsoft Corporation (Venture Funded Company), algorithms, coding interview, dream job

Id: YJZCUhxNCv8

Length: 42min 7sec (2527 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 13 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/Kaaen_Jery97]

I can watch this guy talk all day. Great speaker..

[u/[deleted]]

All the people I know who worked at the big four, all got out as fast as they could...

[u/Caseywatkin]

lol that guy at 8:09 about to leave that cracked me up 2

[u/[deleted]]

All this did was make me realize that i can never do this.