Just got an offer from Facebook in the mid July; however the journey was not an easy one. Before getting the offer from Facebook, I got painful rejections from tons of other companies including Amazon, Google. I thought sharing my story might be helpful to someone who is also struggling like I did.

My journey is little different than others. I started my career as a telecom engineer with a bachelor degree in electrical engineering. I did not have much interest in coding that time.
I fell in love with coding gradually while building small automation tools for my team. After 6 years in the telecommunication industry, I decided to change my career to be a programmer sacrificing my long, successful career in the telecom industry.

I came to the USA and completed my masters in Computer Engineering. My first job as a software developer was in the University of Texas at Austin in their technology resources department and later I switched to a similar position in Texas A&M University. Then in 2018 something happened that changed the course of my life. My wife completed her PhD and got her first job in Oregon. My son and my wife went to Oregon and I was badly missing them from Texas.

Deep in my heart I always wanted to be an entrepreneur and had a semi startup at that time. I decided to leave the job, go live with my family and use this opportunity to go after my passion i.e. try full time for my startup.

At that time I had three years of experience in software development and started developing the web platform of my startup full time. My startup related to higher education ended up helping many students; however, failed to earn enough revenue to pay my bills. I had withdrawn my 401k and invested in my startup and at the end of 2019 I was running out of money. I had to take the tough decision to postpone my startup and go for a job again.

All of a sudden I realized I have enough experience in running a startup from marketing, financing, advertising to investment pitching, writing business plans etc. but that’s not most of the software companies are looking for.

My younger daughter was born at that time and covid 19 broke out as well.

I started slowly in Leetcode and started giving my full effort from January 2020. Long, gloomy winter of Oregon started with covid 19, me and my wife were having sleepless nights with our newborn.
At day time I was trying to put as much time as possible to brush up my algorithm knowledge which I had not practiced for long, rewriting my resume and LinkedIn profile and applying.
I was not really hoping for big companies, I was not confident enough. My resume was getting straight rejections from most of the small companies and later I realized I don't really have software industry experience and companies do not like the gap in career.

I was having difficulties explaining my startup venture which I am afraid caused most of the rejections.

However, I got contacted by an Amazon recruiter and got an invitation for an online assessment in March 2020. At that time I was pretty sure small companies would not hire me and realized big companies are better choices and hopefully they will not mind my career gap. But getting into a FAANG company is easier said than done. I spent a lot of time on the business side of my startup and now suddenly can I compete with all those brightest minds of the coding world?

Easy questions on Leetcode seemed difficult to me, medium questions were impossible. I was trying hard, trying to put almost any time after taking care of my newborn and my 8 year old son. Slowly easy questions were getting easy and I started solving medium questions after solving more than 100 easy questions. After solving another 100 medium questions I felt like I could pass the online assessment of Amazon and I did. I passed the phone interview too.

In the virtual on-site interview in April I did terrible on system design (I didn’t really have big scale design experience) and did medium to well on coding questions. 1 week later I got the rejection and did not get any helpful feedback from the recruiter about the interview. By this time I got rejections from a few other smaller companies. I was really getting frustrated, 4 months had already gone since I began!

I took a step back and was pondering about my mistakes. I went through a lot of discussions on Leetcode and found out I am not alone. I found many success stories have one thing in common, they stressed on quality instead of quantity and emphasized on mock interviews.

I started looking deep into each leetcode question, going through the discussion section and trying to learn from all those elegant solutions. I started mock interviews in pr*mp. I passed the online assessment of Microsoft but the position got postponed and the recruiter failed to manage another position for me. 5 months were gone and I could not see any light of hope in the near future.

In June I cleared the phone interview of Facebook and scheduled the onsite interview in the first week of July. I was trying to do one mock interview every day and that helped me to get confidence and improve my communication skill.

I was contacted by a Google recruiter and they skipped the phone interview and directly arranged the onsite interview. There were 4 coding rounds and one behavioral round. This time I did better than Amazon, at least communicated well. My mock interviews have really helped me. Out of 4 coding questions I solved 2 without hints and other 2 with hints. I missed important edge cases in one of the coding rounds and I believe that bited me back.

A week later my recruiter informed me that my onsite interview was good enough to go to the hiring committee. That little feedback geared me up for next week’s Facebook interview. I was at the edge of giving up everything at the end of June and Facebook was my last hope.

The Facebook onsite started with a product design interview. I was able to come with a working design and talked about different trade offs. But I ran out of time and could not talk much about scaling the design. I nailed the next coding interview. Solved two medium level questions without hints in 40 minutes and was able to go through edge cases. I tried my best in the next behavioral round. It ended with an easy coding problem which I was able to solve. In the next coding round I was able to solve another two medium level questions in 40 minutes. I made a minor mistake in one of the solutions which I fixed with the hint of the interviewer. At the end of the onsite, I was really feeling hopeful and had a feeling that if I don’t get an offer this time probably FAANG is not for me.

3 days later I got rejection from Google. The recruiter did not give any useful feedback, just said I should have done one or two rounds better. I emailed him to learn a little bit more, he didn’t even reply to my email.

Now everything boiled down to Facebook. One week later my recruiter called. He told me that my coding round was really good but I could not scale up my system design. At one point of the system design interview, I asked my interviewer about his opinion instead of explaining by myself and that was a negative point. In the behavioral interview my examples were simple and they felt that I didn’t have an opportunity to work in a large scale complex project which was true.
Considering all these, they offered me a rotational engineering position. Though a little disappointed, I said fair enough! My 6+ months of hard work is going to pay off finally and the desperate time is going to be over!

In conclusion, I would say, it’s not an easy task to get into a FAANG company. The most important thing we need is patience and hard work. There are some brilliant people out there who can nail a FAANG interview with 15-30 days of preparation but that’s not true for all. Do not get disheartened reading stories of success with very short periods of preparation. Those folks are super brilliant, might have prior competitive programming experience or excellent work experience. If you are like me, brace yourself for a long run, keep patience and keep preparing yourself! Best of luck everyone!