HOW TO GET A JOB IN SILICON VALLEY

hey guys welcome to my channel I have a guest today her name is Eva actually I'm her guest because we're in her office she works for air V&D and today we're gonna talk about how you can get into a big American company as an international applicant how to get your visa sponsors and how do you work how do you feel like working in such a cool company like Airbnb so if you're interested police continue watching this video [Music] back to San Francisco - mate [Music] the first time when I visited Airbnb office was back in 2015 and this building was shared with Pinterest conquer some other companies and there were 500 employees now how many do you have four and a half thousand surround that around the world oh my god and they have the whole office now and they occupy another building as well and Peggy another one Oh two more oh wow I've only been to two of them Wow and they also have like office in Europe Wow [Music] so you are an international student you moved from Belarus to Canada and you somehow ended up working for Airbnb tell us how is that possible so yeah that is indeed correct I was brought and raised in Belarus and after graduating high school in Belarus I moved to Canada to do my bachelor's degree at University of Waterloo in Canada and then after graduating I ended up here in San Francisco in the States working for Airbnb and while I was working in Canada actually did an internship here at Airbnb so partially that is the reason why I decided to come here full-time afterwards are you gonna be surprised she works as and I'm gonna make a boss here because you have to guess what she does it's Airbnb you would never guess she's actually a back-end engineer right background banking song you're not even not fronting like fronting no she's a back-end engineer this is a real listing like everything here at Airbnb like every conference room is a real listing and you can actually sit here and have your conference call oh it's a little too small so you studied Chemical Engineering right you Iraq started to study Chemical Engineering but somehow then you realize that coding is your fashion tell us how did you get this engineering education finally yeah for sure so as marina has mentioned I did study Chemical Engineering and part of the reason why I studied Chemical Engineering is because I was really really into chemistry when I was in high school and I decided to do something more applicable with chemistry so I picked a chemical engineering degree however one of the amazing things that I'm really grateful for about my universities that we had a call program where every other semester we had to do an internship to graduate it was a requirement it wasn't optional and because of the those internship experiences I actually realized that chemical engineering was not something that I saw myself doing after graduating I think it was in second year university when I finished my second internship as a chemical engineer I was like yeah this is not something that I see myself June but at the same time I have so many ideas of what I could potentially be interested in and I was totally lost it's honestly I was so jealous of people who just had to figure it out cuz I was like yeah I could try this and that but it's all time commitment to figure it out but luckily I had friends that were in software engineering and computer science and did all these amazing internships in Silicon Valley at the time I actually have never thought that I would be interested in coding because in fact when I took Chemical Engineer and programming classes I absolutely hated them like my least favorite classes ever but so I was actually really close minded to the idea of trying programming courses but then some of my friends convinced me being like yeah but just try taking an online course who knows maybe you'll like it and then finally I was converted to being like okay I'll try a course and then I signed up for codecademy x' web development course and HTML CSS pretty easy introductory course that gives you an instant output of what you're actually coding that is very gratifying for the course and I was like oh this is actually not as bad as I thought and now I'm thinking that it's the problems that I was solving in chemical engineering that I was not interested in and that's why I hated that programming course so much that's that's why I think internship is really important like trying to work during your course and this is why I also always advocate for Canada as well because if even if you don't like a master's program there you do a semester of setting semester working it semester of studying these are the Col programs first you get real-life work experience and you understand what you like second thing you can earn some money and what you manage to write you only pay for like a year and your parents yeah if you pay for a year and a half and the rest like three three point five years of education she was able to support herself which is great for like expensive countries like Canada for us definitely that is actually an amazing thing about Canada despite the fact that he's already cheaper education in Canada is way cheaper than the education in the States but the ability of earning money while I was studying was so key to me being able to support myself and support my education this is Loomis desk and you can tell that she's just like me because how many supplements does she have here maybe ten how much time do you spend here I spent about nine to ten hours here okay Wow coming up at about 9:00 in the morning and I try to leave most likely 6:30 or so but you have food here right so you can have breakfast lunch dinner yes I have all my three meals here usually I'm not like I'm grabbing dinner oh you don't have to cool and you have sports here as well right I've seen yoga oh we do have yoga in the other building I used to go I don't go as much anymore just go to a separate gym we don't have a gym in the building because we're so community oriented where we're told that there's so many gyms in the neighborhood which is support the community that's true what about your holidays how many yeah so we're very lucky because our company is given a gift to employees every year where we're closing down for two weeks during Christmas so that's holidays that is completely set in stone and then we have 14 days of PTO which actually comes down to about three weeks counting weekends moving back to the story I tried out online courses and I actually enjoyed it and I decide to basically take a gamble and try to get an internship as a software engineer to see as marina said it's very important to try out the actual real world field to see if I liked it or not and I studied really hard for about a year and I ended up getting an internship at Yelp and Silicon Valley in San Francisco and that's how I made my transfer for you to understand even if you're studying in Canada or you said in India or you study in Brazil it doesn't matter with the American immigration system you're still an immigrant there are no privileges and they still radio according to whatever rules they have so you need to find a company yourself you need to get their permission to sponsor your j-1 visa you need to apply for a j-1 visa this is not something like better that our Canadian students are privileged for what I love about huge companies like Airbnb they have amazing offices and every single floor has at least two cafeterias the best thing about Airbnb what you see here is not the full selection but this is like kombucha lemonade green tea and if you go to the main canteen they have 21 sorts of kombucha and this is the best this is pistachio and strawberry this like guys I've tried maybe like hundred source of kombucha in my life and this is the best so how did you do that yeah that is super true you have to hustle you have to hustle really hard I hustled a lot I was reaching out to everyone I know I was cold email in so many companies there is this website I think it's called producthunt and there is angeles and four different startups in the area because i wasn't hoping that a big company will take me someone with no experience someone who was self-taught so I was cold emailing all these founders of small startups saying how passionate I am about learning and about their products and that's basically house trying how I was trying to get my foot on in the door and I was trying to leverage my network as much as I could I was emailing recruiters on LinkedIn they're trying to have someone look at my resume as well as applying in traditional ways on companies websites but to be honest I think that hustling and trying to reach out to people directly is the key to getting your foot in the door and will work what worked with Yelp was it like a connection that you had or you just applied through the website it was actually a funny story it was a combination of two things it was a combination of being a hustler and hustling and it was a combination of my university too so as I said my university has a co-op program so they do hire a lot of people from Silicon Valley so the name is quite well-known and I actually saw that on the love my LinkedIn profile a recruiter from Yelp just looked at my profile which I thought was super random because I had nothing related to computer science or tack on my profile results uncle engineering but I was like oh my god this is an opportunity yeah I have to message this person despite the fact I have not nothing on my profile I messaged him being like hey so I saw you looked at my profile I know there is nothing computer science related on it but I'm like I really am interested in internship opportunities so here's my resume and he actually looked at it and he responded and he was like oh I'm actually at your University's campus next week do you want to meet up Wow and I was like no I'm actually in Germany because I was in Germany on exchange at the time so I said but how about we connect over Skype and then he's like yeah I just like message me I'll get back to you when I'm done with recruiting season and I actually was not ready to interview at the time so I didn't message human here obviously did not message me back either because he had no interest message but three months later what when I was really prepared I messaged him being like hey remember me I am still very interested in internship opportunities here's my resume and he responded because he remembered me and he's like do you want to do a call next week and that's how I got my foot in the door [Music] also how many companies have you reached out to oh a lot like hundred for sure because as I said I was reaching out to so many little startups as well as yeah so remember it's it's all like the numbers game if you reach out to ten companies you get nothing don't just continue sitting who yourself is just go on and reach out to more companies like a hundred yeah it's a good number and you will definitely get something at least the idea where to go next definitely you have to be proactive otherwise I mean there's so many other people competing with you at the same time yeah exactly after Yelp you went back to Canada and then you applied for an internship at Airbnb right that's correct yeah I had another internship semester so I had to get an internship somewhere and I was again applying to a lot of companies but I was a little more selective because I already had a big name on my resume so I was feeling more yeah yeah actually was that also random how I got an interview at Airbnb because a friend of mine connected me to undress and Horovitz so a 16z recruiter yeah the C fund and they have a lot of portfolio companies there being these one of them and they connects their portfolio companies with talent and that recruiter connected me with a recruiter at Airbnb that's why I got an interview at Airbnb that's a great tip which is disgusted during the live stream that we had with Vlad and he just graduated from Harvard and he said a lot of graduates actually get jobs through VCS I'm gonna talk a lot about networking on my second channel by the way search of Silicon Valley girl I know each other yeah yeah the link will be below [Music] tell me how this room yeah so this room is the original is a prototype of the original Airbnb apartment where the founders started Airbnb this room is called brauch because the apartment was on Rao Street and actually it's still there on route Street and on the floor of the living room of the Strauss apartment were the first people who were living on air Beauty Wow this is how the room looks like and two guys Brian and Joe right and they were like how do I make some money like because rent in San Francisco is so expensive maybe we can make some extra money by just blowing up the mattress and just renting it out and this is how I really started and I think there was a conference that was going on in San Francisco and they realized they're gonna have the demand because the hotels were fully booked Wow this is so cool so and then after this internship they actually invited you to work full-time right yeah so it's a very common practice here in the valley and I think in a lot of other industries too too bad potential full-time candidates based on their internship at the company and it's actually very safe too because you you as a company as an employer got to work with that person you saw their work and then if they liked it they give you a full-time offer and that's what happened to me I got a full-time offer at Airbnb and then after thinking about other companies and other options I decided to accept it and come back what kind of visa have this sponsored yeah so I went on j1 Hunter graduation actually you can do a j-1 visa after graduating University because I wasn't eligible to apply for an h-1b in that year because you have to have a diploma in April and I do have to have like a bachelor's in order to be eligible for an h1 exactly so I wasn't j1 for a year would be Cabot that they're gonna sponsor me for an h-1b for the following year and I was lucky to get it Congrats yeah the chance is like well people say the chances to get h-1b if you don't have masters from an American University it's 30 percent yeah you're very lucky but if you have masters from an American University your chances go up to 80 percent [Music] if your goal is to work for an American company first hustle definitely second Network third if you have opportunity to get education in the States but if not like Canada is also close and it gets you chances to you know work during your studies and also gets and some work experience here in the States can you give an advice to somebody who is international willing to work in a big American corporation and doesn't know where it just starts yeah for sure I would say Google is your friend there is a ton of you resources I I take Quora is an amazing resource that I found a lot of information from it's a forum where people actually people who know about the field and who know about the question that you're asking can give you advice and information and I found a lot of useful stuff these are related and jobs related you can type in any question like anything third there's almost everything that surprising yeah it is and then just reach out to people you will be surprised at how willing people are to help actually you might think that oh that person will never respond to you but if you're different if you show your passion if you show your interest in wanting to learn or wanting something and you can help them potential in some way which is very important - you will be surprised at how many people can actually respond to you and I would say just try to find resources with respect to your particular field of websites that you should be reading maybe articles maybe different forums and interact with people people is a huge advantage to trying to get your foot in the door your English is your number-one priority if it's not advanced yet so my advice would be if you can travel to Canada for example take it to three week course if you can try with San Francisco take a language course in the morning and then use the afternoon to connect with companies to attend meetups to meet people the link will be below link Richard comm we're happy to help you with not only language courses but also higher education like admissions process yeah you can book everything like all of the schools you can book them online with a discount because our prices are cheaper than looking directly with school and everything is online and this is basically what I do what is that this is my business this is my company guys thank you so much for watching this video up to the very end if you've enjoyed this content please like this video and support us with your comments if you're not yet subscribed to this channel subscribe and if you're willing to study and work abroad check out linguist trip comm and we're gonna help you make your dreams come true thank you so much and thank you so much for thank you for an amazing tour an amazing day bye guys

Channel: linguamarina

Views: 304,894

Rating: 4.929584 out of 5

Keywords: english, english language, learn english, Silicon valley, how to get a job, linguamarina, marina mogilko, silicon valley girl, Corporate job, airbnb, work in america, h1b, work visa, resume, job interview, day in life, a day in life of a software engineer

Id: MTTsfAUPL1E

Length: 18min 31sec (1111 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 18 2018