When I was working for Bloomberg and
Nvidia, I interviewed hundreds of
candidates for software engineering role.
Based on that experience as an
interviewer, and my recent conversation
with many who has cracked FAANG
interviews, I have prepared a
comprehensive study plan, in case you are
trying to get into big tech companies. So
we are going to go over that plan step
by step right from resume preparation, to
job application, to interviews, to salary
negotiation, and accepting the offer.
Many who apply in FAANG companies don't
even get an interview call. Therefore the
first two stages of resume preparation
and job application becomes super
important. Talking about resume
preparation you need to keep few things
in mind.
Let's say you have a special achievement,
such as you are an accepted contributor
in Google Summer of Code. You need to
highlight that achievement in first few
lines of your resume. Now people ask me, "I
don't have any achievement. What should I
do?" Well you can try to get some special
achievement, by doing open source
contribution, competing in coding
competition,
and doing community contributions such
as participating on stack overflow,
contributing to various Discord servers.
My own channel has a Discord server. All
these things will help you get this
first line that you need for your resume,
and your resume will be different from
thousands of applications that these
companies are receiving. When you're
talking about your prior experience, or
even college projects, make sure you use
STAR method to describe that project.
STAR is basically situation, task, action
and result. By looking at this diagram
you will get an idea. So you are trying
to say what impact did you create in
this project. You have to use proofs or
vague statements.
When I receive resumes and when I see
excellent english communication, that
doesn't impress me at all! Everyone
writes that, right? What is the proof? Okay,
you are a secretary of Toastmasters club
or you spoke in PyData event. These are
the proofs, and in order to build these
proofs, you have to work hard right? So
you have to get out participate in
different activities, so that you can
mention those things on your resume. When
people mention their hobbies,
let's say instead of reading books, you
can say which books you like. So this way
you are giving concrete details. You are
giving sort of like a proof that you do
like reading the book. And many times the
recruiter who is reading your resume,
maybe they have a common interest. Maybe
they are reading the same book, and you
got a topic of the conversation.
All in on you should keep your resume
only single page.
I have looked at resumes of 20 years
experienced folks and they write
beautiful one page resume. So if 20-year
experienced person can do this, you can
do it definitely.
I made a detailed video,
if you go to YouTube search for code
basic resume tips you'll find this video.
Although it says data analyst, the tips
which we have discussed are applicable
to software engineer as well. So go over
those tips, and in the video description
I have given few resume templates, that
you can use for your own resume.
All right! You have prepared your resume,
and you are ready to apply for a job.
People have this inferiority complex,
that they are from tier 3 college or
they have
10 years of experience in some service
based company. Therefore uh they should
not be applying for FAANG companies. But
the fact is, that getting job in FAANG and
pretty much any other product based
companies is not as hard as you think it
is. It all depends on your attitude, and
how you are preparing.
For job application, the best way is
always the job referral. So let's say if
you know your college senior, or someone
in your network who is already working
for that company, and if they do a
referral, there is a high chance you will
get an interview call. Now let's say you
don't know anyone who is working for
Google or Microsoft, and you want to go
work for that company, try to build
connection with people through LinkedIn,
through technical conferences. You go
attend conferences,
build connection with people, or build
connection with people on LinkedIn. Now
making connection
with people on LinkedIn is an art, and
there is a whole science behind it you,
and that's a topic for some other day.
But you can Google it, watch some videos
on how to
basically win friends and influence
people, so that when you need a job
referral, there is someone in your
network who is ready to help
simplify.jobs is another portal, where
you can almost do like matchmaking
like shaadi.com where you specify your
criteria, which technology you want to
work in, what is your salary, bunch of
other criteria and it will tell you
matching jobs. See
FAANG companies means five or six
companies. There are actually many other
companies, product based companies like
Square, Affirm, so many companies, where
they offer more salary than FAANG
companies, and more better culture, uh
better learning opportunities, things
like that. So don't think you have option
of joining only these five big companies.
There are so many other companies as
well, and simplify.jobs will show you all
those uh job opportunities, and you can
apply for those jobs with a click. So job
application becomes very very easy when
you are using this portal. This is
something that Jaimin Brahmbhatt used when
he was looking for a job, and he
eventually got a job at Meta. Most
crucial part of the whole process is
going to be coding interview. And not
only for freshers, even when they hire
senior engineers, or engineering managers
they ask coding questions, and you all
know for coding questions, LeetCode and
GeeksforGeeks are the two best platforms,
that you can use to practice.
On LeetCode
there are more than 2000 questions. So
there are
75 curated questions called Grind 75 and
you can use eight weeks time period to
prepare for these questions, and these
questions will cover variety of data
structures and algorithms, such as see
Array, Binary, Binary Search,
Tree and so on. So these are like 75
golden questions from LeetCode that you
can do preparation on. And as it's
mentioned here, you can take eight weeks.
Every week you do like 10 questions
which is pretty much doable, even if
you're working. Let's say you spend one
hour every day, on weekend you spend four
to five hours, within eight weeks you
would be done with 75 questions. And that
is gonna be a gold mine
for you.
This is the resource that Jaimin Brahmbhatt
again he used it for his Meta job
interviews.
I have received so many testimonials for
my own data structure, and algorithm
playlist. Here I have mentioned few
testimonials, I have much many more but
these folks get a job at
Meta, Walmart, Microsoft and so on, and
they all tagged me in their LinkedIn
post, and they were referring to data
structure and algorithm
playlist that I have on YouTube. It is
free playlist. So if you search for it,
you will find videos on Arrays, Hashmap,
LinkedIn, Graph, pretty much all the data
structures and algorithm. I might add few
more videos. But if you look at any video,
uh this will have coding and exercise
both. So I'm giving a very intuitive
explanation, and also giving an exercise
so that whatever practice, whatever
problem you learn,
you can practice on it. And by the way,
there is a Hindi uh data structure
algorithm tutorial playlist as well, just
in case you are interested in a Hindi
playlist. The other uh resource is take
U forward YouTube channel. Raj
Vikramaditya is a Google engineer and he
has solved many problems on competitive
coding. So please, refer to this. My friend
was telling me I don't know I I have not
seen any videos on that channel. But my
friend likes this person, that's why I'm
referring to him. bigocheat sheet.com
is another resource which can help you
quickly grasp the bigger complexity of
different data structures and algorithms.
Now Big O complexity is something you
can't avoid during the interview. In
coding interviews they will ask for this.
So having a handy reference of uh
complexities for different algorithms
and data structures, is going to be super
useful. In youtube if you search code
basics FAANG, you will find a video where
I interviewed Prasad who cracked job
interviews in 10 different companies,
including some FAANG companies such as
Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon.
In this video he has shared the wisdom
of how do you approach the interview.
Obviously this guy has mastered the art
of
cracking uh coding interviews, and he has
shared
all of that wisdom in this video. No
wonder why it received more than half a
million views. I'm going to share few
tips from that video.
Number one is
solving 2000 questions on LeetCode
alone is not going to help you. In the
interview they are looking for your
approach. They are not looking for just
the absolute answers, okay? So when even
when I I interview people, I sometimes
present a vague problem, and I want to
see if they're asking clarifying
questions. And if they're using critical
thinking uh to solve a problem with my
help, right? So many times it is like
you cannot solve the problem alone, but
you can solve the problem with
interviewers help. This is a very
different way of thinking. You know in
the interview when people go, this they
think
you versus me. But no use the interviews
help, to solve the problem, and do a
friendly conversation. Communicate well,
use the hints that interviewer is giving
you wisely, and try to solve the problem.
Don't be nervous, be calm don't make
mistakes, by over preparing for the
interview. Mock interviews are very
effective to prepare you for the actual
round. Nowadays I'm seeing in many
colleges, the professor will help you
with mock interviews. You can also ask
your seniors who are already working in
the industry, uh to conduct the mock
interview for you. If you can afford
money, there are many platforms like
interviewing.io pramp.com I have not
used this platform myself, so don't take
this as my own suggestion. What I'm
suggesting is do mock interviews as much
as you can, before going for the actual
round, because you will get a lot of
critical feedback on your communication
style. Whether you can describe your
resume projects properly or not. See if
you don't do mock interviews, at least
you can
do uh recording, voice recording, and try
to describe your resume projects. And
when you hear to that voice recording,
you will get an idea if you're using a
lot of filler words, or
if you are describing your resume
projects with enough clarity and so on.
So do mock interviews, do your own voice
recording,
so that you are very well prepared
before you go for the actual interview.
The other tip I want to share is using
Python instead of Java and C++
in the coding round. The reason I'm
saying is that when I was interviewing
at Bloomberg, I noticed many candidates
they used Python and they were getting
unfair advantage because
Python has a very compact code syntax. So
you don't have to remember a lot of
things. If you have to write let's say
5 lines of code in Java, same thing
can be done in Python in 1 line of
code. So see you are in a very intense
environment of an interview, and you now
you don't have to memorize things, and
you have to write
less lines of code just because you're
using this Python language. On my own
portal codebasics.io I have this
Python course at a very affordable price,
and I'm using very easy to understand
explanation, so that learning python
sounds like a child's play. We are also
using project-based learning. So learn
Python if you don't know that already,
and I have some data analytics and few
other courses as well. Planning to launch
more courses so check out Codebasics
.io
If you are an experienced candidate, you
will have a system design coding round,
where they ask questions such as design
Twitter, design Facebook feed, etc. You can
practice
these interview questions on a famous
YouTube channel by Gaurav Sen, where he
explains you know how to design WhatsApp
for example, how to design Instagram and
so on, and his videos are
very popular. You can watch these videos,
learn system design. Another resource is
system design primer
where
there is a Github page, and you can
scroll down, look at system design object
oriented design question. For example
here we are talking about design Twitter
okay, and
you can go through the solution. By the
way don't go through the solution
directly. Try to work on that solution on
your own. This is super duper important.
If you look at the solution, your mind is
biased and you can't prepare well, all
right? You want to get a job in FAANG
companies you do preparation on your own.
First attempt should be your own genuine
attempt, and then only look at the
solution.
The
other round that they usually have is
behavioral interview. Now in companies
like Square for example, they call it a
leadership interview,
which is mainly for experienced folks.
But general behavior question are asked
even within the coding interview,
they're trying to check your attitude,
and check your behavior in. So it's
important that you prepare for
behavioral questions.
Again techinterview
handbook.org website has a nice
collection of the most commonly asked
questions.
They also have company specific
questions. For example here there are
Amazon
uh specific behavioral questions. So if
you prepare for all these questions,
they're going to be very very helpful. If
you're talking about Amazon, they ask
this
Amazon leadership principle question. So
if you don't know about it, just Google
Amazon leadership principles, you will
find
the core
values that they have when you talk
about leadership, and
having good understanding of these
values are going to be very useful. When
you go for an interview, make sure you
study that company, their products,
clients, their culture, and so on. That way
it looks like you're not there just to
get another job, or for money. You really
care about working in that company. You
care about the core values and so on. So
preparing for those values is
as important as preparing for your
coding round.
Now many companies give
interview material in advance. For
example
here in U.S. if you apply in Facebook, they
will send you all the material, including
mock interviews conducted by Facebook
engineers. So there will be two
Facebook engineers who will be doing
mock interview and they send you this
video. So before going for an interview
if you watch the video.
you will get some preparation in terms
of what you expect
out of that interview round.
So if you're getting such an email with
all the resources, make sure you study
them really well. Let's say you passed
all the hurdles, and now you got a job
offer,
there comes salary negotiation. Now many
people don't even negotiate salary. They
will take whatever is given to them. But
don't do that mistake. You can always
negotiate salaries, and there are
websites like
levels.fyi
they give you an idea on
how much salary every company is
offering. For example Microsoft senior
uh engineer, they get this much. And this
is the data from people posting their
real salaries. There could be some fake
salaries. But majority of them are kind
of trustworthy, and you can also
use their negotiation services, okay? So
let's say you don't know the art of
negotiation,
you can get negotiation coaching. So on
website like levels.fyi if you go to
services click on negotiation coaching. Uh you
can use pay some money, but let's see if
by negotiating if you get
10, 20 lakh rupees of raise,
then why not, correct? So
negotiation is something that
programmers are not good at, and if you
get some coaching, it's gonna be helpful
anyway. All these resources are available
on my Github page. The link of this page
is in video description below. So it
you know uh shows you a summary of the
entire process. So we talked about resume
prep, job application,
three type of interviews, salary
negotiation and our job offer acceptance.
I have also mentioned
the key resources right? For coding, Leet
Code GeeksforGeeks are the main one. tech
interview handbook, let me show you this
website so tech interview,
interview
handbook we talked about
grind 75 here,
and there are a lot of useful uh
resources on this particular website.
We talked about using YouTube right?
Couple of YouTube channels, my own
data structure algorithm playlist, take
U forward, Gaurav Sen and so on,
and I have
prepared uh the list of all these
resources, which you can
use, and you can also share it with your
friends, who are looking for interview
guidance. And thanks
to all these LinkedIn posts. See I talked
about all this LinkedIn post of people
getting jobs in FAANG companies, and
my playlist was one of the resources. But
they mentioned few other resources. So
I'm going to give a link of this LinkedIn
playlist. These
links are available here.
Watch this particular interview, uh if
you click on this one for example,
this interview is
full of interview wisdom, okay? 600
000 views there is a reason, and if you
can read the comment read it. I mean it
just
tells you the quality of the wisdom that
is shared by my good friend Prasad in
this video, alright? Again I want to say
that cracking interviews in FAANG
companies is not a rocket science
nowadays. So be very very confident,
prepare with a discipline, make a study
plan. If you want to have do it in a
group, go to my Discord server. So if you
check my video description, I have
Discord servers where you can make,
you know you can have partners who are
searching for jobs together, and make
buddies or group, and prepare in a group
rather than preparing alone. And when
you're preparing in a group, the other
person can help you with a mock
interview,
resume review, and so on. And that is very
effective way
of preparing.
I wish you all the best! If you have any
question post in a comment box below, and
if you know anyone who is preparing for
big tech companies interviews, please
share this video with them, along with
this Github link. I wish you all the best!
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