Uncover the secrets to how people get hired

This came in the midst of my Google loop. I was still waiting on their feedback when a Microsoft recruiter reached out. The timing was challenging since it coincided with suuuuper heavy sprint cycles at work, but I managed to carve out the necessary time. The recruiter call was a…

2026 DS job hunt: 2 offers, $300K+ TC I kept seeing people say the DS market is terrible, so I figured I’d share my experience. It definitely isn't easy right now, but I don't think it's hopeless if you prepare well. I started looking a few months ago because of a career bottlene…

I went through full interview loop at Google for L6 MLE position. This is how it went. I won’t be able to share the exact questions. Round1: ML system design, went well. Question was about designing a content moderation system. Feedback: Positive. Round2: ML system design, went v…

I recently started as a data scientist at a fairly large tech company in Palo Alto, and figured I’d share the process since my background was pretty nontraditional. I was working as a financial analyst for the government, so I definitely didn't have the typical CS/ML background.…

Landed an L4 SWE role at Meta earlier this year. Got pretty lucky with the timing and signed before the Feb 10 layoffs lol. 2.5 YOE | $350k TC $193k base / $29k bonus / $128k stock I’d been looking for a job for 9 months before this, so this was definitely not a quick/easy search…

I applied for the role through an internal referral, which helped me get connected to the recruiter quickly. After an initial screening with the recruiter, I moved on to a second-round interview with the hiring manager, where we discussed the role in more detail, my background, a…

Got hired 8 weeks after getting laid off. Here’s what actually worked for me. I’m a senior product designer and was looking for hybrid roles in my city. No FAANG on my resume, no fancy school, nothing particularly impressive on paper. I applied to 58 jobs → 8 interviews → 1 offer…

Background going into this: 6 years of experience as a backend engineer, strong on distributed systems and Python, average on algorithms. I did not grind LeetCode for this one and it turned out that was the right call. Preparation Anthropic's interview structure does not reward L…