This was a great post. I think it is tilted more toward engineers in larger orgs, where there are many teams, but I still appreciated all of it.
The preening and snacking advice was spot on.
However, the last paragraph was a bit jarring. You'll be judged by:
> your prestige, the prestige of the titles you’ve had and companies you’ve worked at, your backchannel reputation, and how you present in your interview process.
But only the third one (backchannel reputation) is affected by all the other advice. You can be a preener at Uber or Google and you'll probably have a better chance of being hired at a FANG than someone like me who has worked for smaller companies most of his career.
That said, my goal after two decades is to find a company where I'm happy rather than clawing after the most prestige, so perhaps I'm misreading what he's saying.
I believe part of the magic of the FANG process is that it actually doesn't matter where you come from for likelihood of hire. It probably matters because they can level set but for hiring you have to knock out the interviews, which are the same whether you've worked at Google or Billabong Valley Software.
Yeah, the focus on the specific interview in the moment has both upsides and downsides. It can be frustrating and arbitrary but it also avoids some traditional in-group shenanigans and unfairness that is common in a lot of places. "I have to study all this crap even though I've done X, Y, and Z already" on one hand; "I can study independently and prepare for this interview even though I don't currently work at Google" on the other.
That said: names still help - if someone's on the fence then saying something like "they didn't do that great but based on their projects at Google I think they probably just had a bad day" isn't uncommon - but it's far from a requirement, which is a good thing.
The preening and snacking advice was spot on.
However, the last paragraph was a bit jarring. You'll be judged by:
> your prestige, the prestige of the titles you’ve had and companies you’ve worked at, your backchannel reputation, and how you present in your interview process.
But only the third one (backchannel reputation) is affected by all the other advice. You can be a preener at Uber or Google and you'll probably have a better chance of being hired at a FANG than someone like me who has worked for smaller companies most of his career.
That said, my goal after two decades is to find a company where I'm happy rather than clawing after the most prestige, so perhaps I'm misreading what he's saying.