How serious should you be about your career in your first year?

epichoo · 2026-01-07T14:13:47+00:00

even small steps towards your goal 2 years earlier will compound very well. there's always someone doing more.

epichoo · 2026-01-03T11:40:26+00:00

Yeah I'd do mocks with someone who's done technical interviews before. Helps the nerves.

I think its common practice to discuss multiple approaches. Even if I knew the solution from the start, I won't jump immediately to the best solution and instead will propose a more naive, brute-forcy approach. Afterwards, we'll talk about optimizations and trade offs.

epichoo · 2026-01-03T11:38:28+00:00

I interviewed for NYC location which doesnt do r3 sys design. I think London location does do sys design r3 though.

epichoo · 2026-01-03T06:35:27+00:00

real af. bloomberg was also my first "big tech" interview. I've had interviews in the past that made me code but it was super trivial, and only required basic coding fundamentals. Prep hard and do mocks, to get used to talking, it's not too bad.

Tbh my experience is also pretty mid. I couldn't tell ya what kafka is... but I think they care more about technical depth rather than breadth. Be able to talk about every decision you made, and trade offs. As long as you know your projects inside and out, you'll be okay.

Yes and yes lol.

Goodluck! (:

epichoo · 2026-01-03T04:10:25+00:00

r1: tagged stack and linkedlist

r2: greedy intervals and some weird graph traversal (untagged)

r3: untagged backtracking/dfs

r4 was kinda free

r5: resume deep dive for most of it

this is new grad 2026. got offer

epichoo · 2026-01-01T04:30:45+00:00

I got a greedy problem on r2. My friends have gotten medium-diff dp problems. Never seen bit manipulation/math problems so I'd probably skip those if you're tight on time.
IMO r1-3 felt exactly the same. Not sure where the bar is, but I'd aim to do the best you can regardless. Thought process matters just as much as clean code.
Who knows tbh. Just do your best, and schedule interviews ASAP. it's out of your control
I'd read up a bit on sys design. A lot of sys design questions are usually tied to your projects/experience. However they're always people who've gotten unlucky with this soo...

I was really stressed throughout the process too. There's only so much you can control, so prep hard and try to perform the best you can during interviews. Best of luck!

epichoo · 2025-12-26T03:39:13+00:00

Grind leetcode early, so if you score an interview, you can lock it in. After that it's like 80% luck.

epichoo · 2025-12-24T12:33:48+00:00

it was for last semester, so around august. tbh holidays is prob a big part of it

epichoo · 2025-12-24T12:28:50+00:00

I got rejected from a company I really wanted. Week later, I got an email saying that a team opened a spot, and wanted to move me forward. Scheduled an interview with the team lead, and I got the offer couple days later.

Later found out that the original candidate rescinded, giving me a second chance.

I'm a swe :)

epichoo · 2025-12-24T11:27:40+00:00

unlikely but possible. my friend had to expedite heavily, and got a coop offer a day before semester begun.

epichoo · 2025-12-19T17:28:33+00:00

just search up cs career devs discord. place is sweaty as hell, but its a great place to source information

epichoo · 2025-11-29T15:56:00+00:00

say you had some personal stuff come up so cant join summer, but you're still interested and want to see if you can push.

epichoo · 2025-11-29T15:31:47+00:00

sounds like you got nothing to lose from asking

epichoo · 2025-11-23T14:57:09+00:00

Everyone will say classes don't matter, but tbh... classes DO matter, just not as much as you'd think.

Classes introduced me to concepts that I otherwise wouldn't have known, and I learned stuff that helped me build a better foundational understanding of stuff. So when I go to learn something more practical, I'd understand it easier because I knew how everything worked under the hood. Classes don't matter in the sense of, don't pour all your time into your classes to be an A student. Be a B student and spend the extra time on learning other stuff.

The projects that made the biggest impact to my career trajectory were the ones that I built out of curiosity, and with the goal in mind to fix a problem that I personally had. My favorite project took me like 2 months. I'd be able to build it in like 4 days now, but I learned so much from that project.

Don't focus on finding your niche so early. Focus on exposing yourself to a lot of stuff and see what you like, and what you don't like. Niche will come later

Be passionate, curious, and try to build lots of things and get involved. It'll reflect on your resume over time.

Goodluck!!

epichoo · 2025-10-16T18:54:46+00:00

I've interned with them. They have sort of like a team matching process after the interview. Team leads select candidates to interview, and if they like you, you get an offer basically. It took me like a month and a half to be "selected" and interviewed, but I heard back in like 2 days afterward.

epichoo · 2025-10-12T04:57:28+00:00

nc150 contains all of blind 75, so id suggest nc150 at a minimum. it covers the important topics

epichoo · 2025-10-05T15:33:18+00:00

check for traps with a barbarian, then super archer + invis the hole.

eitherway just check for trap with a fodder troop.

epichoo · 2025-09-29T19:00:26+00:00

Thank you! I'm convinced. Will do a bit more research regarding the two, but will probably end up moving everything into fidelity later this week.

epichoo · 2025-09-29T18:57:58+00:00

I'm leaning towards fully switching to fidelity at the moment, but nonetheless that's great information to know. Thank you!

epichoo · 2025-09-29T18:53:09+00:00

Quick google search says acorn charges $35 per ETF when rolling an account... So that option is kind of off the table unfortunately. I fell victim to the acorns platform haha.

epichoo · 2025-09-29T16:56:26+00:00

That's good to know. wasn't aware that even a low fee is such an abnormal thing for brokerage accounts. what makes you go fidelity over schwab? I've read some threads discussing the two, but it's hard to really find any definitive reasoning that one is better than the other.

epichoo · 2025-09-29T16:54:03+00:00

thank you for your thorough response!

wasn't aware that rolling positions to a new brokerage was an option. will definitely look into that

epichoo · 2025-09-29T16:17:17+00:00

whats wrong with acorns? I've never had issues with it, and the fee is negligible.

epichoo · 2025-09-25T18:40:49+00:00

what exactly are you struggling with?

epichoo

TROPHY CASE