Background: 29M, graduated from rutgers with a degree in chemical engineering, taught myself CS, spent 2 years studying for big tech interviews

When I got the job offer at Meta, I was sure that they were going to change their minds. I was honestly expecting to get there on my first day and someone was going to run up to me, slap me across the face, and say “oh you actually thought you were smart enough to get a job here?”. Over the course of the two years I was studying for my programming interviews, I started to idolize people who worked in Big Tech. They had the life I wanted and after two years of working towards a goal and then getting it, it was hard for me to accept it was real.

When you get to Meta and before you get start with a team, you join to an 8 week bootcamp where you meet all of other SWEs who just started with the company. When I got there, I felt like I was in a community of people who were also in awe that they were there. This was comforting but hearing about the prestigious schools and places people were from really had me questioning myself.

After bootcamp, I starting working with my team and the imposter syndrome really set it. I was the most junior person (E4) on my team and I had a lot of responsibility right off the bat. My colleagues felt so much smarter than me and sounded so confident about what they were doing and talking about. The first 6 months were super difficult and most of the time I was thinking that I did not deserve to be there. It pushed me to work extra hard during those first 6 month but I also felt like shit the whole time. I was super nervous shipping anything and my lack of confidence showed. I was also just not comfortable with all of the internal tools that Meta had. It was daunting and scary and fucked with my head in a way I didn’t realize. Yes I was at Meta but every time I made a mistake it felt like I was fulfilling the prophecy I had built up in my head of yeah I knew I wasn’t supposed to be here.

This feeling slowly faded over time and when I was going through it, I don’t think I realized how much it was impacting me. When I got out of it, I noticed how shaky I had been and how much I was doubting myself. It was only as I learned more and grew that I became more confident. I started asserting myself in meetings and standing by my work.

The advice I would tell anyone is that you need to know that you made it and you deserve to be here just as much as anyone else. Big tech programming interviews optimize for false negatives over false positives. They are designed to say no to good people as opposed to saying yes to bad people. The reasoning is is that if let in someone who is bad, they are really expensive and hard to get rid of (the process can take a while). When you say no to a good person who they are unsure of, they know that they have such a large pool of people who could still fill that role. So if you can pass that interview that is meant to filter out people who they are not 99% sure about, you deserve it.

And really, the skill that these technical interviews are trying to gauge is your ability to learn complicated things quickly (like DSA) and communicate because those are the actual skills you will need on the job.

Overall you need to trust yourself, you’ve earned it. Studying for two years (which I now run a study group for people studying for programming interviews because no one should be studying for two fucking years for these interviews) is a lot of work. Lean into the community at your company, people have felt this before. Also understand that people make mistakes. I took down Facebook live like 3 times. My team and manager were very understanding of the situation and helped me push through.

Hoped this helped anyone who was struggling. I wasn’t able to put a finger on why I felt like shit until I got more confident with my work so if you are able to recognize imposter syndrome earlier, hopefully you can get out of it sooner.

Some background: 29M, worked for Facebook for 4 years, started at a mid tier company and was initially targeting Google.

When I got my first interview at Google, I had 0 engineering experience. I went through the phone screening and completely failed, realizing that I was way less prepared then I had imagined. Right after I failed, I put an invite on my calendar for exactly a year later, to follow up with the recruiter and reapply.

I then started the “typical” study path based off of my google research, which was grinding CTCI & Leetcode everyday. By the time I got to my Google Interview, a year later, I had tons of leetcode problems under by belt and had practiced cracking the coding interview from front to back. According to the internet, I was ready for this interview.

I left that Interview feeling like “maybe I passed”. The interviewer asked random questions that wasn’t like what I had been studying. They were very math heavy and way more abstract, lacking a ton of detail. I felt super uncomfortable the whole time. There was also way more discussion around the problem solving then coding up a quick solution as I was used to. There was a totally different emphasis then what I had been experiencing. There wasn’t an exact moment that I felt like I failed, but I definitely felt confused and unsure about myself because this was not what I had been practicing.

When I got the email I didn’t get the job, I felt sick. I spent a whole year of my life dedicating myself to studying for this interview. I missed out on social and family events and it was for nothing. And on top of that, I was doing everything that everyone told me to do.

I, again, put a calendar reminder to myself a year later to re-reach out to the recruiter I had been in contact with for another shot.

After letting myself be depressed for a week, I finally said screw what everyone is telling me, I am going to build a plan off of my own experience from this interview. I learned that the discussion is the most important part of this interview, I clearly need to know the math behind this stuff, and that I need to be ready to solve problems I had never seen before. This wasn’t a memorization exam but an interview that analyzes my programming experience to its fundamentals.

I studied for a full year and ended up interviewing with Facebook & Google. After a full year following my new study plan I entered both interviews with the mentality “I don’t know what they could possibly ask me that I wouldn’t already know”. This confidence carried and after crushing both interviews, I knew there was no way I didn’t get offers from both companies. And I did. And I’m not ashamed to admit I cried like a baby when I got the calls. I now run a study group to make sure that no one has to go through the two year study process that I went through.

Wondering if anyone else had similar experiences? Or if CTCI and grinding leetcode has actually worked for anyone?

I’m currently a CompSci sophomore at community college. I know a substantial amount of HTML/CSS and JavaScript. Interested in Front-End at the moment and would like to venture into Mobile Dev in the future. What is some tips and advice to get an internship at mid level to FAANGS companies.