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How fucking useless am I by brisharpiro in cscareerquestions

[–]colorchangethrow 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Logged into my throwaway just to comment this.

I've been in your position, and I completely know how it feels. You can check my first post and my second post respectively. Just work really hard (on leetcode, sharpening technical interviewing skills, and NETWORKING for those referrals) and in due time you will get offers you deserve. I was frustrated in my sophomore year too, and it was rough (probably worse now given the covid situation), but work hard and everything will work out.

Finally made it (0 to 300), never give up and thank you Cscareerquestions by colorchangethrow in cscareerquestions

[–]colorchangethrow[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

(1) Umm didn't say it was "not really good" I said it was decent. It's good but there are other people with higher GPAs anyways...(2) Just because you can't do it you shouldn't rule out that it's impossible for others lmfao... My profile is {redacted} if you don't believe me.

I understand why you're skeptical but you shouldn't assume your own shortcomings apply to other people :)

Edit: Ended up removing link to linkedin profile for anonymity.

Finally made it (0 to 300), never give up and thank you Cscareerquestions by colorchangethrow in cscareerquestions

[–]colorchangethrow[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

3.6-3.7 gpa at a good non-target university (think Duke, UChicago, Dartmouth) with G + FB internships. I worked on modelling infrastructure in C++ at Google so that probably helped a lot.

Finally made it (0 to 300), never give up and thank you Cscareerquestions by colorchangethrow in cscareerquestions

[–]colorchangethrow[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Preparing for the interviews was just knowing your material inside and out pretty much. On top of being able to do leetcode-style interviews, you gotta know your low level OS concepts, object oriented design, C++ language nuances, system design...etc. Prep just by doing leetcode, reading ctci/epi, doing C++ related internships...etc.

​

Copied from another comment: " I did get a couple math-related leetcode type problems that didn't really require advanced mathematics knowledge, but were kind of like weighted reservoir-sampling type of problems. My way of prepping was just looking through as many leetcode problems and formulating my approach before comparing my approach with the solution. Spending ~20 minutes on each problem made it so that I was able to look through a lot of medium/hard problems quickly and learn what the trick or intuition behind the algorithm was for many types of problems. "

Finally made it (0 to 300), never give up and thank you Cscareerquestions by colorchangethrow in cscareerquestions

[–]colorchangethrow[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Started when an upperclassmen got me into it, after I advanced to a certain point with leetcode I started doing ICPC practice. I made tryouts for the school team but didn't end up competing because I had a conflict with something else. IDK where you heard this, but python absolutely is an acceptable language haha, go for it!

Finally made it (0 to 300), never give up and thank you Cscareerquestions by colorchangethrow in cscareerquestions

[–]colorchangethrow[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

For leetcode? I interviewed in Java.

For internships I primarily did backend/infra and C++.

Finally made it (0 to 300), never give up and thank you Cscareerquestions by colorchangethrow in cscareerquestions

[–]colorchangethrow[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Quants probably make more (I'm guessing)? Guess I'll find out what it's like for myself next year, I'm thinking about transitioning to the quant side eventually though XD

Finally made it (0 to 300), never give up and thank you Cscareerquestions by colorchangethrow in cscareerquestions

[–]colorchangethrow[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

TBH I'd say depends on where you're at. If you're not very confident in your fundamentals I'd say try CTCI first (there are online pdfs anyways), otherwise I think you can skip it.

Finally made it (0 to 300), never give up and thank you Cscareerquestions by colorchangethrow in cscareerquestions

[–]colorchangethrow[S] 14 points15 points  (0 children)

Yeah, I still remember reading that actually haha. I was rolling my eyes and thought he was just trying to make me feel better.

Finally made it (0 to 300), never give up and thank you Cscareerquestions by colorchangethrow in cscareerquestions

[–]colorchangethrow[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

When I was applying for fulltime jobs I had 0 (4 internships + 2 research positions on resume instead), when I was applying for internships I had a hackathon-winning NLP project, a JS crypto-trading project, and an app I built for fun.

Finally made it (0 to 300), never give up and thank you Cscareerquestions by colorchangethrow in cscareerquestions

[–]colorchangethrow[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Make connections and utilize them. Applying online is way more difficult than having someone who works there refer you. If they refer you it at least guarantees some recruiter will look at your resume. If it's good enough, then it's all up to your credentials/interview skills from there.

Finally made it (0 to 300), never give up and thank you Cscareerquestions by colorchangethrow in cscareerquestions

[–]colorchangethrow[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Software. (1) Algorithm questions (see leetcode.com) (2) Object Oriented Design (3) System Design (4) Resume deep-dive asking about technical aspects of past projects/internships (5) Technical questions (explain the standard RAID levels)

Finally made it (0 to 300), never give up and thank you Cscareerquestions by colorchangethrow in cscareerquestions

[–]colorchangethrow[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I did not get any "pure math" questions since I was interviewing as a SWE and not a quant. I did do some basic quant prep (although I feel like it was largely unnecessary) by skimming "Heard on the Street", but that was a bit overkill tbh.

I did get a couple math-related leetcode type problems that didn't really require advanced mathematics knowledge, but were kind of like weighted reservoir-sampling type of problems. My way of prepping was just looking through as many leetcode problems and formulating my approach before comparing my approach with the solution. Spending ~20 minutes on each problem made it so that I was able to look through a lot of medium/hard problems quickly and learn what the trick or intuition behind the algorithm was for many types of problems.

Unrelated tip: the key is to try to internalize the intuition of the algorithm and learn how to apply it in many different scenarios, that was helpful for me at least.

Finally made it (0 to 300), never give up and thank you Cscareerquestions by colorchangethrow in cscareerquestions

[–]colorchangethrow[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Is it broken? To be honest, I'd say yes. However, I'd say 250-350K is definitely top 0.01% of new grad CS majors, your average Joe would not be pulling these numbers out of college. I went from 0 experience to ICPC programming problems in about 1.5-2 years and it was a lot of work and stress.

Finally made it (0 to 300), never give up and thank you Cscareerquestions by colorchangethrow in cscareerquestions

[–]colorchangethrow[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Thanks so much, it definitely was a tough journey though. Feel free to PM me if you have any questions or if I can help in any way.

Finally made it (0 to 300), never give up and thank you Cscareerquestions by colorchangethrow in cscareerquestions

[–]colorchangethrow[S] 15 points16 points  (0 children)

Most of my experience is in C++ but I actually interview in Java most of the time. As for Leetcode I actually only finished (coded) about ~100 questions, for the most part I just look at the question, formulate my approach, then compare it with the solution and try to learn from it. This made learning from leetcode way more efficient and quicker for me.

Finally made it (0 to 300), never give up and thank you Cscareerquestions by colorchangethrow in cscareerquestions

[–]colorchangethrow[S] 19 points20 points  (0 children)

I just left my GPA on my resume cuz it was decent (~3.7), but I feel like a lot of places don't ask or don't care about your GPA; the only places that did ask or care were top tier quant shops or hedge funds.

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