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"hacking" your way into FAANG?
I am a CS grad from a non top 20 CS schools and I find it very difficult in getting an interview with the big tech companies. I have 2 years of work exp with a startup from the Bay and have open source contributions in my resume. So I feel I have decent profile, but getting past ATS in the biggest roadblock. How can I hack my way into getting an interview?
I am looking for summer internships btw.
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EYEDEETENTANGOSoftware Engineer at Nvidia
When I was hiring, I would see dozens of pre-screened resumes for a role, probably would get them in batches of 20-30. A recruiter had already filtered the *thousands* of resumes we would receive for every single role down to that, and then my job was to pick what I thought were the best 3-4 to call in for an interview.
And it was not easy to do that, because those resumes were very strong, so our team would individually rank them all, and then we’d come together and take a look at anyone we’d ranked greatly different to resolve, before passing it up to our manager who would make the final decision with our input on how to call in.
We did one of these roughly every month while the team was hiring.
The competition for these roles is *fierce*. I can point blank tell you that if you had two years of experience at a no-name company, with only a bachelor’s, I wouldn’t have even seen your resume, the recruiter would have filtered it out before it got to me. Every resume I saw had 5-10 solid years of growing experience, sometimes starting at small companies but usually by the time they hit 5-7 years they were either director level employees at startups or they’d moved on to bigger companies by then, the mid sized ones.
The only time we saw folks that were actually entry level were for the internships and if you thought the previous was cutthroat, Jesus the internships. One midsized company I worked for would *only* take interns from a preselected, preapproved list of schools. No exceptions. None of the large ones I’ve worked for would allow anyone who’d actually graduated already to be an intern, they require you to be actively enrolled in either the 3rd or the 4th year of an accredited CS program. And dear god the stuff they filter on there. Trust me, those kids would happily knife you for that internship.
And it was not easy to do that, because those resumes were very strong, so our team would individually rank them all, and then we’d come together and take a look at anyone we’d ranked greatly different to resolve, before passing it up to our manager who would make the final decision with our input on how to call in.
We did one of these roughly every month while the team was hiring.
The competition for these roles is *fierce*. I can point blank tell you that if you had two years of experience at a no-name company, with only a bachelor’s, I wouldn’t have even seen your resume, the recruiter would have filtered it out before it got to me. Every resume I saw had 5-10 solid years of growing experience, sometimes starting at small companies but usually by the time they hit 5-7 years they were either director level employees at startups or they’d moved on to bigger companies by then, the mid sized ones.
The only time we saw folks that were actually entry level were for the internships and if you thought the previous was cutthroat, Jesus the internships. One midsized company I worked for would *only* take interns from a preselected, preapproved list of schools. No exceptions. None of the large ones I’ve worked for would allow anyone who’d actually graduated already to be an intern, they require you to be actively enrolled in either the 3rd or the 4th year of an accredited CS program. And dear god the stuff they filter on there. Trust me, those kids would happily knife you for that internship.
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If you’re not getting past “ATS”, then I’m here to tell you some very sad news: it doesn’t exist. Everyone loves to believe that there’s a computer that is filtering their resume before it’s being seen, because the alternative would require them to accept an ego hit: someone human looked at your resume and decided that you weren’t worth even talking to, that’s how unqualified you were for the position.
Which is typically the unfortunate reality. I’ve worked for Google, Apple, and now Nvidia. The reality is that the “big name” companies functionally do not have junior positions. They have positions that are *marked* junior but they receive so many applications that anyone who is actually junior just isn’t going to be a competitive person for the role.
There’s two ways to “stand out” and get in: 1) the simple way, actually just go get 5-7 years of progressive experience in the field at smaller and midsized companies, which is what I recommend or 2) somehow manage to outcompete folks with 5+ more years of experience for the same role. Typically, the only way to do #2 there is to have a PhD in an extremely relevant field for the role, and even then it’s not easy, you basically have to be a rock star.