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Great advice. The only thing that's missing is to grind leetcode as hard as you can. As much as HN and Reddit hates leetcode, most companies still use it in some form. Getting good at leetcode-style questions will allow you to get through the first few interview stages more consistently. Then, in the later interview stages, you can show off your personal projects and open source contributions.
I've worked at multiple of the FAANG. Everyone acknowledges they study for the interview. You may occasionally get someone trying to make out they could pass without study but even then they acknowledged they studied. This isn't something to be arrogant about. It's a process designed to filter out those who'd refuse to study to get the job. You have to study. Doesn't matter if you have a PhD and write books on CS. St…
The good news for me was that even though I had terrible grades, I knew how to code a Knight’s Tour or 8 Queens, work through some algorithm that appears to be N^2 but has a clever N solution, or if someone asked me about manholes, I could say “that’s a stupid question, here’s the default answer, and here’s why I think it’s a stupid question.”
I think I got 9 job offers from 10 interviews with a In short, studying for the test helped with the SAT’s and it helped get my first job. When I applied to a FANG years later, there was not leetcode, just different design questions or basic things like making sure I could reverse a linked list or implement substr without an off by one error.