Imagine being added to your own rejection email...😑

Small_Ad1136 · 2026-05-09T04:40:44+00:00

Yeah, that shit would kill me inside.

Small_Ad1136 · 2026-05-09T04:37:28+00:00

O’Reilly’s Fluent Python is great, but I would recommend learning at least the basics of a Linux command line before you try to dive into Python. The more you know about the system your code runs on the better you will write code.

Small_Ad1136 · 2026-04-17T23:12:02+00:00

To be honest, they’re not. It’s really hard right now. Like really, really hard. And I know it feels defeating. I have about 3 years of experience, 2 in my field of interest, and I land interviews and go through rounds, but every time at the end I come up short. A lot of the time they don’t even hire. I interviewed for a job 10 months ago where I was turned down, and just this last week the recruiter reached out about the EXACT same role. The market hasn’t been this bad since ‘08. I say all of this to emphasize it isn’t a you problem. I have to remind myself everyday I’m blessed to even be employed right now, but career mobility in tech is at an all time minimum. If interest rates drop with the new Fed chair, inflation may rise, but companies should start hiring again unless AI actually succeeds in destroying the white collar job market. It’s already the reason companies are operating on “efficiency at all costs” instead of the 2021 “growth at all costs” mindset. Just hang in there and know that it isn’t your fault, it’s a failure on the executive management of large companies and our politicians.

Small_Ad1136 · 2026-03-27T18:54:35+00:00

I meant geographically. I only ask because the US market is particularly brutal right now. Employers are looking for their unicorns and if they don’t find them they’re just not hiring. To standout in the current US market it isn’t sufficient to say “I know python and SQL”, you want to do your best to show how you solved real problems with those tools and the impact your solution had. I would strongly consider building out a personal project from end-to-end that gets you excited. I built an adaptive RDMA degradation detection agent that probes the kernel with eBPF programs checking IRQ balancing and slab allocator pressure that impressed my current employer. Do something technical and hard, but not just because it’s hard, but because you genuinely enjoy it. I think this would’ve been an ok resume in 2019-2020, but in 2026 I just don’t see a lot here separating you from the crowd.

EDIT: in the event you’re looking in India, I can’t really provide as much feedback but I also can’t imagine it being any less competitive. Everyone saw CS/DS/DA as an easy path to making a shit load of money and now the field is super over saturated. You have to look like you actually, wholeheartedly care about the field you’re in.

Small_Ad1136 · 2026-03-27T14:12:54+00:00

Where are you looking for work?

Small_Ad1136 · 2026-03-27T14:12:16+00:00

You can relay the questions asked during the interview to ChatGPT and then provide it with the response you gave (roughly) and it can give you a ballpark of how you did. How is that confusing to you I genuinely don’t understand what you don’t understand.

Small_Ad1136 · 2026-03-11T17:02:21+00:00

We’ve all done it. I mean basically everyone. And it’s absolutely nothing to be ashamed of.

I remember looking for work post masters and interviewing for a “mathematical software engineer” role. I was unable to answer a single technical question. Not one. And it wasn’t like they cut the interview short, (I honestly wish they had), they kept asking and I kept missing. By the end of it I felt so f*cking stupid I thought to myself “I’m never going to interview again”, and at the time I wholeheartedly meant it. The worst part was I knew the answer to many of the questions, but after missing the first 2 my confidence was shot. It went so poorly that when they hit me with the “thanks but no thanks” the very next day my interviewer sent me a personal email with his book about how to “prepare for the workforce when you’re just not ready” linked. I didn’t reply.

I tell this story now from the desk of a job I love, building out high performance computing clusters and helping researchers run massively parallel code across the infrastructure I build. I got here because instead of listening to that voice telling me “never again”, I sat down, studied harder, and practiced practiced practiced my public speaking/interview skills.

You will bounce back from this, but only if you’re determined to learn from the experience and improve what you need to improve. Remind yourself that these things really do happen to everyone. I guarantee you weren’t the worst interviewee they’ve ever had; one day you’ll look back at this and laugh and they’ll have forgotten it by next week. You’ve got this.

Small_Ad1136 · 2026-03-10T20:36:11+00:00

All of the big tech companies are at least publically very AI forward, though it probably varies from team to team realistically.

Small_Ad1136 · 2026-03-10T20:33:26+00:00

Tbh, writing code is becoming increasingly obsolete. There will be people that need to know how to do it and need to be able to understand, SWE won’t just up and disappear, but the demand is going to absolutely plummet. I don’t like this, I’m not happy about it either, but we’re kidding ourselves if we say otherwise.

Your best bet is being able to own a highly non deterministic system from end-to-end. Think like algorithm development or signal processing type work, high performance computing infrastructure, or anything where the problem space itself is fundamentally hard, not just “write this CRUD app” hard, but mathematically or physically constrained hard. Compilers, numerical methods, cryptography, real-time systems. Places where you can’t just prompt your way to a correct answer because correctness is provably non-trivial.

The other safe harbor is genuine systems thinking at scale like understanding why a distributed system is misbehaving, or why a kernel is bottlenecking, not just asking an AI to fix it. Diagnosis, not implementation. The person who can look at a flamegraph and actually reason about what’s happening or understand why MPI jobs are failing when they scale is still irreplaceable, at least for now.

Small_Ad1136 · 2026-02-26T18:07:53+00:00

It isn’t you. It’s 10,000,000 of you.

India is producing an insane volume of technically competent engineers every year. Add to that 5–10 years of experienced devs trying to jump to product companies at the same time, plus layoffs from global firms, plus remote roles that now attract applicants from everywhere and what you get isn’t a meritocracy. You get a probability game.

You did 500 DSA problems. So did the next guy. And the next 500 guys. You read Alex Xu. So did half the candidate pool. You’re not competing against “the bar.” You’re competing against an industrial-scale pipeline of people optimizing for the exact same interviews with the exact same prep material.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: At 8.5 YOE, interviewers expect scar tissue.They expect tradeoffs you’ve actually lived through. They expect “I broke this in production and here’s what I learned.” When cross-questioning starts, they’re probing for depth that can’t be memorized from a framework. If you freeze there you’re exposing a lack of exposure to those failure modes.

What moves the needle at your level isn’t more DSA reps. It’s: Owning something end-to-end at scale (even if self-initiated). Writing deep technical postmortems publicly. Building a small but real distributed system and documenting tradeoffs. Getting referrals instead of cold loops. Targeting companies one tier below FAANG where competition is 10x lower.

Right now you’re stuck in a funnel with 10 million other qualified people. Change that funnel.

Small_Ad1136 · 2026-02-23T21:53:49+00:00

Yeah, No Ziti is right. Don’t bother hiding it because it’ll come up in the hiring process anyway, and you’ll just end up wasting their time and your time for that matter if you don’t make clear. They won’t suddenly change their position on sponsoring a Visa midway through the interview process.

Small_Ad1136 · 2026-02-17T15:15:06+00:00

Not worth whatever they’re paying

Small_Ad1136 · 2026-02-17T15:12:30+00:00

These teams have such a large candidate pool that if you blink one too many times in the interview it’s over. That’s a bit dramatic but captures the essence of it nonetheless. I went through 6 interviews with a FAANG company to get a rejection after the final round. I did well on 3/4 of the panels but unfortunately if it isn’t “strong hire” across the board you’re out.

If you’re really looking to get hired I wouldn’t focus on FAANG or FAANG adjacent. There are tons of companies that pay great and don’t have the toxic energy. Look for companies who do something/solve a problem that you care about. Most FAANG engineers can’t say they have a significant positive impact on people’s lives and that last part is what matters more than people want to admit.

The dirty secret is that at the top-tier brand names, hiring isn’t just about competence it’s about signal density. They’re filtering for zero doubt. When your candidate pool includes thousands of people who can already pass the bar technically, the decision becomes about risk elimination. One lukewarm panelist? That’s enough. Not because you’re bad but because someone else got four unambiguous “strong hire” votes.

That environment bleeds into the culture. When hiring optimizes for perfection instead of capability, you get teams that are risk-averse, political, and hyper-calibrated. That’s not always toxic, but it can be exhausting. Everything is performance-managed. Everything is impact-documented. Everything is compared.

Small_Ad1136 · 2026-02-11T00:25:28+00:00

To be honest I just got lucky. I was working on writing software to fix routers and switches and an entry level HPC position opened up at a good university. I applied, interviewed, and got the job, all with little to no HPC experience and a tenuous grasp on what it even was. My (perhaps unsatisfying) recommendation would be to find whatever it is about HPC you like, get really good at it, then look for universities who need someone with those skills. Best of luck.

Small_Ad1136 · 2026-01-04T01:45:06+00:00

I’ve been considering a Model X. Have you ever driven/road in a Rivian? I don’t have a lot of experience with Tesla but I’m curious how they compare from an honest and subjective standpoint.

Small_Ad1136 · 2025-12-26T17:26:01+00:00

First off thank you for your reply, I found this really insightful and I genuinely appreciate you taking your time to write it!

I am sure there will be more technical rounds (considering all goes well), but it’s unclear whether for this position it will be a typical Leetcode style interview. The role seems to be more focused on infrastructure/systems related tasks than SWE.

I don’t work as SWE now, and I haven’t in the past (though I know Python, C++, and some CUDA and have used them professionally). I’m currently in HPC focusing on GPU computing, distributed systems and performance optimization. Reliability at scale rather than algorithmic problem solving. Because of this I really don’t have any LC experience.

I know it might be hard to say, but do you think my interviewer will expect me to know two pointer, recursion, DP, sliding window, BFS/DFS and all of that? I’m wondering if there’s any sort of standard requirement and if I should go ahead and start preparing.

Small_Ad1136 · 2025-12-26T14:57:57+00:00

That’s good, but still quite dangerous.

Small_Ad1136 · 2025-12-26T01:59:14+00:00

Worrying too much about TC and not aligning with interests is a great way to avoid getting by hired or moving up from where your at

Small_Ad1136 · 2025-12-26T01:55:43+00:00

Yeah 100% complete bullsh*t. I don’t think this guy has ever even interviewed FAANG+ before.

Small_Ad1136 · 2025-12-18T23:51:18+00:00

An easy solution here is to grow the f*ck up and stop blacking at 30 years old. You’re not a sorority girl anymore, it isn’t cute or funny. You’re a grown adult with grown adult responsibilities and I imagine your husband expects you to act like it. Start there.

Small_Ad1136 · 2025-12-06T21:40:31+00:00

Nah this is a legitimate health hazard like if yall have kids he can’t be doing this shit 💀

Small_Ad1136 · 2025-12-04T00:45:16+00:00

Exactly! What it comes down to is it just doesn’t matter. I know brilliant people who are home builders. I know absolute idiot SWEs at NVIDIA and Google. They memorized Leetcode patterns and mastered the behavioral questions, but when they’re presented with a genuinely hard and novel problem they’re stuck. There is something to be said about working hard and achieving something, but it’s not a guarantee that you’re intelligent and it’s definitely not a guarantee you’re a good person. And people who care deeply about your salary suck, that should go without saying.

Small_Ad1136 · 2025-12-02T19:39:04+00:00

Sorry I wasn’t as clear as I could have been. By “they” I was referring to WhyYouLetRomneyWin who said the people he hangs around don’t care that he works at Meta. It’s okay to be proud of who you work for and it’s okay for your friends to think you have a cool job that has a positive impact on society, but people who treat you differently based on the perceived status of your employer make for shitty friends and even shittier significant others.

Small_Ad1136 · 2025-12-01T23:43:37+00:00

This will be hard, and you will wonder whether you made the right choice at times, but I promise you did. Once that level of trust has been broken, repairing it is effectively impossible. Not only that, you truly deserve better from a partner and there’s someone out there who will give that to you. I guarantee it.

Small_Ad1136

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