#Dec 24 grad still unemployed, only get interviews with ref (6). What to improve cuz I need job pls

1 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

leaden iron
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Are you aiming for swe or mle

dense fog
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wow ur cracked bro 4.0 gpa

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and publication + 2x intern

nova portal
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I thought u were international.

fluid urchin
fluid urchin
fluid urchin
fast wadi
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are you getting past HR or are you failing when it comes to HM wanting to interview you

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there's a lot of technical jargon HR wont understand and this should focus more on bigger picture

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SWE intern bullet points look very trivial

random ether
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Your resume and experience looks solid in general. Dumb down the descriptions a little bit while still hitting key tech key words, remember these are HR people looking at the resume first, not seasoned SWE's. But in general, I don't think your problem isn't your resume or current experience, it's the actual application, or moreso where/how you apply. No matter how stacked a resume is, there's always a huge RNG factor to it that can affect if your resume will actually get seen/get a fair assessment. The fact that you're getting interviews with referrals tells me that they like you once you get a set of human eyes on the resume. You need to focus on mitigating the RNG as much as possible when you apply.

You already alluded to plan A, which is stack referrals. Do whatever you can to get as many referrals as you can. Don't cold ask, actually make a connection with people, get to know them, you'll have a much much higher chance of securing referrals.

Other than referrals, if you have to apply the normal way, apply early, as early as you can. What I like to do is to aggregate a list of companies (especially in your case, look for ones that are H1-B friendly, bigger companies are much likelier to do it vs smaller companies), and check it literally daily. I like to put all of them in a chrome bookmark folder, and every day just right click and hit "Open all in new window", and go through them quickly one at a time to stay on top of them. Fun little tip, the majority of company career pages saves your search filters on the link itself. Set the filters you want (type of role, Location/country, YOE, etc), sort by newest, THEN save the link to your bookmarks. It makes checking companies really efficient, all the relevant new roles are right at the top when you open it and you can very quickly check if no new jobs are posted so you can move on quick.

If you see a CS position you like, and it's a little specialized in nature (like SRE/devops, ML, embedded), tweak your resume to tailor it to that position. I'm not saying you pull experience/projects out of your ass, but if you have something for a niche then emphasize it more. Gotta please the ATS autoscanning overlords somehow.

Lastly, note that you had 6 interviews. That's six chances that you have been given that are fumbled one way or another (not saying they all are or are not your fault, just making a generalization). If you're getting a few but not many interviews, you absolutely need to be prioritizing being able to hit those interviews out of the ballpark. Leetcode like your life depends on it, and work on your interviewing soft skills over and over and over and over again until they feel like a conversation to you, not feeling like you're on the hotseat. It's easy to kinda neglect interviewing prep when they are so far and thin, but you need to make sure when it does come, you're absolutely ready.

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i was gonna give brief pointers at first but my meds kicked in so you get the full picture kekw
I do feel bad for you. Yea there's little things in your resume that can be improved, but someone with these stats should not be left in the dust for 7+ months, so I reckon it's other parts that's holding you back

near radish
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my goat

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also dont use abbreviations for vt and iupui

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aint no one know what iupui is LOL

fluid urchin
# random ether Your resume and experience looks solid in general. Dumb down the descriptions a ...

this is actually so good ngl. The H1B thing especially, I didnt think of that. Isnt there a website that shows companies that sponsor the most. Lwk should check that everyday
And yea I now got a network in most big tech companies that sponsors, but I wanna lock in to some mid level companies too. The hard part is finding these companies. The github repos dont do much for me tbh
And regarding interview, ngl my lc stats are over 1300 but I still suck at talking and solving at the same time. And a big choker for me is that once I see a question and idk immediately how to solve it, I start rambling and going all over and my brain doesnt work so even when it is super easy question, I fumble

fluid urchin
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ngl I just wish I had some good company internships

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stupid covid fucked me over

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and us laws

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"u cant intern till u have done 1 year at school" bruh lemme work

fluid urchin
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my only interviews were big names like MAAG and bbg and tower

fluid urchin
random ether
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I feel like the advice I gave applies to a lot of people ngl. There's a lot of people in this channel that has solid and stacked resumes, while there are things that people can always optimize and improve, but I reckon a lot of people here would get better results with laser focus applying rather than spray and pray

fluid urchin
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idk what to do cuz I want the tech people to know the tech work I did, but yea idk if recruiters will get what I was doing

fluid urchin
fast wadi
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honestly i think they care about being able to prove youre worth a $100k+ salary

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companies are getting stingier IMO

fluid urchin
fast wadi
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show how what you did was significant to the broader picture

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your SWE intern bullet points basically just say you built and hosted a webpage

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why, what did it accomplish, etc

random ether
# fluid urchin no clue, most of the time I get auto reject. Also idk how many mid and small com...

If you get rejected after a day, most likely they have an internal checklist that you need to hit (like you need to hit at least 7/10 of the technologies listed, or at least x amount of years of experience for example) and anything less gets auto-bounced. This is why blind spray and pray doesn't work. It's fine if you wanna mass apply too, but read the listing. If you align then great, if you're close to it then adjust the resume to match it better, if you're not even close then don't bother

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oh yeah i feel you lmao, it's always the bigger companies that i've seen more traction with than any small company ever has, and I think that simply think that comes down to big tech having a higher headcount set student/graduate pipeline they do pretty much every year, vs small companies that hire based on need (and these days the need isn't there as much)

fast wadi
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i will say over the past year i've had, without trying very hard, about a dozen or so processes and i pass the HM interest filter about 90% of the time

random ether
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Hiring new grads are what I consider to be a loss leader in the hiring world. AKA more likely to take a short term loss in the hopes that there are longer term benefits. Even in a bad economic time like now, big tech will do that even if it's a little less now. Most legacy companies and even startups care more about short term sustainability since they don't have cash to burn

fluid urchin
fast wadi
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C++ resume, no referrals

fluid urchin
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somewhere on the server if ok, I just wanna look

random ether
# random ether Hiring new grads are what I consider to be a loss leader in the hiring world. AK...

that's why I kinda roll my eyes at people who say "Looking at big tech is elitist and unrealistic, go for legacy companies or small companies" just for most of said legacy companies to not hire new grads at all, and the ones that do hire will have probably copied the same hard processes as big tech, but add a lot more obscurity and RNG at the interview process itself, where limited headcount means even if you have a perfect interview you could still be cut because there was 1 spot and this other guy they liked more. All that for 30-40% less pay. At that point I rather just put the same studying effort and try my chances with an established hiring process at places with a lot higher headcount budgets to not fuck me over even if i do super well

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sorry, rant over kekw

fast wadi
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honestly i've had more success with startups than big tech

hallow ore
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If I may provide my 2 cents, you could perhaps put the VT/IUPI tag in the same line as the company/job title
this would either give u 4 more lines of space to breathe or 4 more lines ot experience u can put in

fluid urchin
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Hmm I guess I could add more to my swe internship that way
Gotta find a way to edit Jake's resume now

fluid urchin
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Made some updates

image.png
next obsidian
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education can probably move down on your resume

ruby aurora
fluid urchin
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I should keep it up cuz I just graduated

next obsidian
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yeah you have positions that appear as FT

fluid urchin
ruby aurora
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idk if everyone recognizes iupui is indiana university - purdue university indianapolis

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lowk

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maybe just say purdue

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purdue indianapolis

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cuz iupui is some long ass name

fluid urchin
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agreed

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@near radish said the same thing

storm berry
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Is ML seriously this competitive

fluid urchin
# storm berry How is bro unemployed with this resume

ok so this is how it has gone
Meta (Nov 4): did tagged, got 6 questions and 2 were untagged hards and just bombed it
Google (Dec 2): had 2/3 great techs but the first tech fucked me so hard cuz interviewer didnt get simple english and didnt help me at all even when I struggled, no hints and just said "figure it out this is your interview"
Zon (Jan 23): Choked on check if given tree is BST, my solution was really complicated and when I went home and saw the soln I kicked myself. Other techs I did great
BBG (Feb 4, on campus interview): Did great on first tech, and did great on 2nd tech but mfer still failed me idk how. My hunch is he talked a lot during interview so he thought I needed hints when I didnt. I knew how to solve the problem (it was word break 1+2). I shouldve shown more balls and told him to stfu ik how to solve this
Tower (Feb 6): Got academia sql and python question aint no way gonna solve them
Apple (Mar 14): Got the hardest question of my life in round 1, designing a rate limiting system in c++ with smart pointers, Never worked with smart pointers before and I was told I can do interviews in python so I didn even prep c++
TikTok (Apr 16): Solve the lc well but last 20 mins asked some MLE question which I answered correctly but still she didnt like the "way" I answered them so rejected
Zon part 2 (May 29) First round was behavioral, My intv didnt know what RL was even tho he works in ML team, so I spent 20 minutes explaining to him what it is and ended up getting distracted from focusing on the LPs. Might have failed this round cuz of that tho unlikely. 2nd tech was LLD, I solved the problem optimally but interviewer suggested there is a more optimal code, but then we went through the constraints and code and he realized that my code is the most optimal. 3rd tech, I initially had a small bug for first problem and took me some time to fix it, 2nd problem I solved with hint. I failed this too T_T

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isnt UIUC the UIUC of the midwest?

lost bear
lost bear
fluid urchin
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I saw u too

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I cant expand more, no space

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I just link them and use keywords

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if someone is interested in projects they can click on link, I mostly tried focusing on first two experience sections

gritty mantle
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or ft?

fluid urchin
gritty mantle
fluid urchin
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racism prolly

nova portal
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if you think its racism try to use the face whitening cream they sell. Its quite popular in the subcontinent. JKJK.

fluid urchin
twin forge
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How did you get so much research 😭

broken wasp
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Do you have your google scholar or something listed?

fluid urchin
untold willow
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Over

fluid urchin
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overgrown.rover — 10:12 AM
Over

fluid urchin
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which one

fluid urchin
twin forge
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Oh wait, I’ve been here before. My bad.

fluid urchin
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@violet spindle