This is a very quick aside to the Meta interview, as an updated guide to a previous post.

Structure

Meta Leetcode rounds comprise of 2 questions: one warm-up (usually a medium question) and one “actual” question (usually a medium to upper medium).

The LC rounds are structured such as:

• The first question should take you about 10-15 mins

• 20-25 mins for the second question

• 5 mins at the end to ask your interviewer questions + maybe 1-2 mins buffer in the beginning for introductions.

As an intern your round is: 1 LC round

As a new grad your round is: 2-3 LC rounds + 1 behavioral round.

Tips:

• If your initial introduction is going on too long (rare instances I’ve seen this happen) just say, “Sorry to interrupt, just b/c we are low on time, maybe we can start a question for now, and move this conversation to the end of the interview?”

Meta’s Rubric:

Meta really does focus on:

1. Communication

   1. How well do you explain and communicate

2. Analysis

   1. How well do you frame the problem, pro / con, time complexity

   2. Logically able to walk through it

3. Coding

   1. Clean code

   2. Write fast

   3. Able to test your code

B/c of this, follow the coding template:

How to Study:

Study the top questions on Leetcode for Meta’s question, or join the Paid Discord, instructions in the table of content, in order to get access to Meta specific curated questions.

We have 108 curated questions that are NOT JUST LC 100 questions but rather curated questions most commonly asked by Meta.

Conclusion:

Meta’s interview is focused a lot on speed and accuracy. With 2 questions per round, it can be intense, so it is very important to answer in a prepared manner.

This article is to go about an update on the things that has been happening so far.

Live Calls:

Sept 18th:

https://discord.com/channels/818765568177602571/1262826171767459871/1286165888852295700

Discussed what Meta was looking for in the paid channel + tips about the resume process + insights of what they do.

Oct. 4th:

https://discord.com/channels/818765568177602571/1262826171767459871/1292136426929913901

We talked about some behavioral interview tips mainly + tips around the hiring process in general.

General Tips

Some people are freaking out way too much. It is okay to not hear back right now. The whole application process mainly is Sept 1st to Oct 15th, so you need to imagine, even people in the process right now are in the earlier end, as we transition to more and more interviews.

Company Specific:

Meta:

People are having relatively decent success in my opinion. Obviously, not everyone is hearing back, but a good amount of people in the Paid channel in Discord, are finding success cold emailing the NG recruiter that we have. And even those without initial success are able to follow up.

I’ve added a new data point to that sheet.

Google

The current Google recruiter datapoint we have, seems solid and responsive. New issue is that she now seems to be focusing on new grads, who have graduated, with some level of industry, who is looking to break into new grad hiring.

YMMV, I had a couple people in the past month get through for new grad without graduating. But maybe she is getting more overwhelmed now.

Palantir

Continues to be a hit or miss. You probably need to hunt this down yourself, but they are responsive if you can get a good recruiter. Which is the tough thing.

Bloomberg

Seems to only be hiring through their career fair link. This is shared in the paid discord channel + other avenues / ways to find it. It doesn’t seem that there is a blocker that they must have attended your school + you must have gone to the career fair.

YMMV with Bloomberg, I am seeing about a 10% to 20% success rate here, so much less than Meta. But for people who are getting reached out, it is great to know they are hiring. This year might continue to be restrictive as they did last year.

Amazon

Continues to be nothing happening 🤔. Not much datapoint to what I am hearing.

I don’t know about you, but even my Classpass Infinite free trial isn’t enough for me.

One… well I’m just not going to the gym as much as I should, but two, sometimes I just want to go downstairs to my apartment’s “paid lounge / gym” which is crazy to me that they try to charge me 60 to 100 dollars a month for.

So how do I get it for free? (or not quite free - but in the long term at a very very reduced cost).

Use this..

https://flipperzero.one/

There is a device called the Flipper Zero, which is able to read / write / emulate a bunch of card devices.

If the card isn’t password protected you can just directly read / write / emulate with it. Such as Nintendo Amiibos so on (which is actually why I got it at first).

But then I realized, hey, a friend in the apartment building is paying for lounge / gym access already, and after talking with them, they were down to let me clone it… and thus!

No more 60 to 100 dollar fee per month for a stupid gym / lounge (which imo should just be given to me since I’m already paying a lot of rent for my NYC apartment). But anyways, that just my two cents.

End of the day.. Cost calculation

Flipper zero is like 169 dollars. So don’t get me wrong, it is by no means cheap. But you only need the Flipper zero itself, and nothing else. And if you are a tech enthusiast, and into things like downloading amiibo nfc cards online (maybe even starting your own business cloning / reselling them), so on, there is so much interesting opportunities for this device!

End of the day, to have the opportunity to go to the lounge and not pay for it (if it isn’t included in your rent + also other opportunities such as consolidating remotes / writing new keys for me and my family / playing legend of zelda with all my fake amiibos / me being a tech enthusiast) makes it worth it to me.

We are constantly tracked by ads every day + spammed all over. There is something called a Raspberry Pi - where you can use it to basically blackhole all ad provider, but the setup is a bit annoying. So what if there was something there all you need to do is change your WiFi setting?

Just go to Wifi Settings.. DNS..

1. Replace the existing one with the following: 89.163.155.202

What is this?

https://cynthialabs.net/dns/

There is a programmer, who maintains a DNS server to: “It also has 1.5M rules for filtering to remove all sorts of trackers from google, facebook & co. It also tries to protect you from accessing some known malicious websites, but that is not its primary goal and should not be relied upon! ” - This text has been copied from CynthiaLabs - Copyright 2020 - 2022 | https://cynthialabs.net/dns/

In fact, it is so crazy how many links online just break when I go to them, that I need to turn on a VPN to disable the DNS on my wifi, but at the very least, this will help you stop getting attacked by many ads.

Other alternatives..

Obviously there are other stuff as UBlock Origin, and so-on, but I think just having something even more aggressive than just normal ads, and to stop trackers embedded in pages are great.

Panera bread sip club, is basically free ice coffee / drinks every 2 hours. They seem to only care about a new email; haven’t gotten around to 3 months yet to try it again with the same phone number, but is an easy exploit.

Website

https://www.panerabread.com/en-us/mypanera/subscription.html

If you need to generate new accounts:

This article will cover new grad and intern hiring process mainly. But has relevant terms even for those in industry.

Terminology:

The interview process tends to be broken up into 3 main points:

Leetcode: A website where you study coding questions that are often given during the interview process.

Online Interview: Which is an online coding round to filter out candidates

Phone Interview: Which is usually a single round (45 mins) to screen candidates

Final Round (Onsite) (Super day): Which for interns usually only consist of one round; full time / industry consists of 3-5 rounds. P.S an “onsite” now does not actually mean you go in person. Is a legacy from before covid.

Technical Rounds: Leetcode-like / algorithm questions.

Behavioral Round: What it sounds like, behavioral rounds.

Hiring Manager Rounds: Where you talk with a hiring manager, usually behavioral focus, dives into your history, sometimes they ask a light Leetcode question, can highly depend.

Some companies will have different process, such as some companies will not have an OA, some companies will skip the phone interview, some companies will have interns and new grads both do 3-5 rounds for the hiring process so on, but the general structure is the same.

It generally consists of OA / Phone / Final Round.

Intern Process

Intern processes tend to consist of OA/Phone rounds + a final round. Depending on the company they may have OA > Final round, or OA > Phone > Final, or Phone > Final.

Internship processes tend to have their final round only consist of one technical round, making it generally much easier to get.

New Grad:

New grad roles tend to go from from OA/Phone > Final round, where the final round, can consist of 2-3 technical rounds + 1 behavioral round.

Notes for Internship / New Grads:

1. You don’t need to study system design, such as how to build a scalable instagram clone. System design tends to be only for industry mid-level engineers. At most some companies might ask you very high level ideas of how to build a system such as, what is a load balancer, caching, so on. But definitely not to the rigor of a system design interview. And I wouldn’t study anything about even the “high level system design interview” unless you know for sure that the company will have it such as Netflix and Palantir. Otherwise most companies only do Leetcode questions.

2. You should be able to build a basic class + methods. Such as if I ask you to create an LRU cache . While “class” questions are uncommon, it essentially is still Leetcode, but I find a lot of people have trouble with it if it is unexpected. You don’t need to particularly study this in my opinion, unless you have trouble with class-based questions, but it really is just a basic extension of data structures and leetcode.

Exceptions:

Always double check the company however. For example, Bloomberg for both interns and new grads have everyone do a 3 technical rounds + 1 hiring manager round. So in terms of the number of rounds is the same.

Overview

I’m not a big fan of career fairs personally, but sometimes for some people, I’ve seen it work out. So these are my tips for people who do attend career fair in terms of what you should get out of it, rather than just handing them your resume.

Ask them for their Email

“Hey, just wanted to introduce myself, I’m Justin a full stack web developer at NYU, here is my resume. I just wanted to ask, are you in charge of the student recruiting process? If so, could I get your email or an email of someone who is? I would love to be able to just follow up after this career fair. Is there maybe also like a generic team email that I could email cause I am in the process of actively interviewing right now.”

(What is the goal? Get someone’s email, so you can apply the cold emailing template:

[Hopefully you get an email]

Additional contact info:

“Just wondering, is there any other way best to reach out to you, since I do want to try to align my interview processes best I can? I hope is okay to confirm that email is the best way, or if some other way like Linkedin etc is better?”

[Goal is just to double confirm and fish out any more information]

Confirm Timeline

“Thank you so much, last question, could I also just ask, are you guys already in the process of actively interviewing? Or will that take time? I know some companies are already doing so, but some are just processing resumes and still figuring out schedules”

[What is the goal here? Figuring out the timeline.]

Everything else

Obviously, if you have time, introduce yourself, talk about the company, your own skills, but I usually find career fairs very fast moving, tons of people, so the goal is, get an email, be able to follow up, and go from there.

(Also why I hate career fairs, cause it just a swarm of people).

Note:

This is just all my personal opinion, maybe people have better tips about what to do at career fairs, but I always found it exhausting for myself and never ended up panning out for me. But again, others have had better experiences.

While, I personally have not done system design myself, I have studied for it, and came across exceptional resources that I think you can cross-validate with your own findings.

I don’t want to be the “advisor” here, as I don’t have again, the requisite experience of actually having to go through the system design interview but here is what I’ve come across when I was studying for it.

Note, system design is usually only needed for SDE II (Amazon equivalent) roles or above. Meaning usually 2+ years of experience, and depending on what level and company the degree of expectation can be different.

Designing Data Intensive Application

This is an extremely famous book in scalable system design, and while I personally only got half way through, I can see why it is popular. I don’t recommend this to study system design, as it is way too comprehensive and grounds up, walking you through the fundamental thought process of how a lot of these services came to be.

But I do think is still a great book overall.

ByteByte

ByteByteGo is a great resource by Alex Xu which is basically an online version of his physically printed book - both edition 1 and 2 is basically in the online version website. Personally, I prefer the online version owning both the physical + having tried ByteByteGo before.

HelloInterview youtube Channel

HelloInterview really does create great quality resources, and I think their resource on how to approach the system design interview matches exactly my own methodology to always have a consistent structure.

I think this video in particular exemplifies a great job, and they have other such videos too.

Subscribe now

Step 1: Set the Foundation

I won’t banter too much on this point, but make sure if not already you have a solid foundation as talked about here

Step 2: Best Resource to Study?

Meta tagged questions on Leetcode are “somewhat” accurate that they are either the exact question or a modification of it (usually a modification).

Let’s take an example what I mean by a modification, which can often get people to FAIL the Meta interview, b/c like my “How Best to Study” article, people often make the common mistake trying to just “memorize” solutions.

For example, this is a question on the top Meta’s Leetcode list - Random Pick Weight, but the actual question is a slightly modified problem statement where they ask you to “pick a city based on population distribution”. (I know this problem says Google, but in general this is a popular problem multiple companies I’ve seen give and have seen given by Meta multiple times).

Still if you know this, I recommend to go through the top 50-100 Leetcode questions on Meta Leetcode tagged, if you only get through 50, is completely fine! The main idea is to set a “foundation” for you to then expand out from. The questions are not going to be again, the actual question that “exactly” shows up (unless lucky), but it should give you ideas on weaknesses to then shore up more on.

In addition, YOU MUST focus much more on analysis and speed. Meta’s questions are often looking for if you have both the speed and insight when you solve.

Step 3: Practice

Mocks + Speed

Meta expects you to go through about 2 medium questions. The first question tends to be a medium, while the second one tends to be a medium to upper medium. Both questions should be solved in about 40 mins worth of time.

The first question must be solved in approximately 15 mins, with the second one taking about 20-25, giving you 5 mins worth of time.

The best way I would do this is mocking with other people, or recording yourself, so you are used to using the framework I talk about.

For Meta, you can focus a bit less on the “explanation” due to a lack of time, and focus more on the coding and validation.

Leetcode Assessment

Leetcode has a page for company assessments, I would go through the Meta onsite simulation to just get a feel of getting random questions and being able to code it. Considering that you won’t have to explain it to anyone, I would give myself a total of 10 - 15 mins a question to be able to code it out, assuming the question is of medium difficulty.

Step 4: Meta’s Rubric

Meta really does focus on:

1. Communication

   1. How well do you explain and communicate

2. Analysis

   1. How well do you frame the problem, pro / con, time complexity

   2. Logically able to walk through it

3. Coding

   1. Clean code

   2. Write fast

   3. Able to test your code

So if you are unable to do what the template tells you to do, or something similar, you will have more difficulty making sure you fulfill the requirements.

Summary

1. Meta focuses a lot more on being able to solve problems quickly and consistently

2. You still need to have the framework I recommend, or some methodology similar in order to make sure you check off the rubric of what they are looking for.

3. Studying Leetcode tagged questions are great, but you still need the analysis and not just memorization

4. Do a lot of mocks with people + practice recording yourself + leetcode assessments so that you can practice being in an unfamiliar environment and diagramming on a text editor an explanation.

To get access to the Paid Discord section, DO NOT JOIN THROUGH SUBSTACK. Please join through: this payment portal

After you purchase, will ask you to connect your Discord account which will automatically add you to the server and give you the role.

Paid Discord comes with:

• Group calls

• Recruiter emails during recruiting season

• Access to old livestream

• Priority support on your situation

Overview

I already have a section in the paid part of my other article of other industries I’d target such as banking, consulting, so on. In addition in another article, I break down per company basis timelines / tips I have for those companies.

For this article, I want to talk about the major players I think will be in this upcoming season (right now is August when writing this and the season for applying starts in September, and interviews from October through December, so who knows if this is correct, but this is my prediction based off of empirical anecdotal datapoints).

Main Companies I’d Target for Consistent Interviews:

There are three main companies I’d be targeting:

1. Amazon

2. Meta

3. Bloomberg

Don’t get me wrong, I definitely think there are other companies you can target such as Capital One, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Cisco, Accenture, Mckinsey, Deloitte, so on… but in terms of great salary + tech culture + consistent interview process, I think the three I listed have the best shot.

Note:

I am not saying not to apply to more companies!! I am just saying, these three in particular, I’d be trying really hard to get an interview process started, b/c I believe that the data points suggest that you could probably get one to all three of the companies to give you an interview, and which ever do, or if all do, their process is relatively consistent and tame to try to convert into an offer.

Amazon

Amazon tends to process OAs in batches, meaning that when you apply, they tend to send out batches of OAs in October, November, December. So don’t be worried if you see a bunch of people get OAs but you didn’t. You can always use my tips in the other article to have two running applications though potentially.

I’d only do the second app, maybe if it is mid-October / late October and you see a bunch of people getting it, but you don’t.

What this means though is that once you get the OA, as long as you can pass it you can pretty much get to the next stage which is a final round, which tends to be a lower medium to medium leetcode question. Even easy leetcode questions, I’ve seen given. And for an intern, it’s only one question, often making this one the easiest FAANGs to consistently get.

Meta

Here is the tricky thing about Meta, most of the time, you can apply and not hear back. But I’ve found over the years that if you find a first-point-of-contact recruiter with Meta, who is responsive, you usually have a 70% to 80% chance to get through. I’ve had some mentees be unlucky and get ghosted, so don’t get me wrong, it’s not a 100% chance, but there is definitely a very substantial portion of people I recommend to cold email who do get the interview. I personally would apply, then wait, and then would start targeting cold emailing for Meta around October 15th through December.

Meta can be a bit inconsistent with when they begin their interview process, but if you see data points of people getting into final round interviews then I think it’s a good time to start cold emailing.

Interns only have 1 technical round for their final, where you need to solve two problems. Where new grads is more intense where each you can have 2-3 technical rounds (each round with 2 questions) + 1 behavioral. But if you are solid at solving problems, it’s a great company to get an offer from.

Preparation Tips for Meta:

Bloomberg

Bloomberg is definitely a more consistent one to get. The way I’d approach this is reach out to a recruiter for student processing on Linkedin (I don’t know who that is, but if you can figure out that is great), or cold email them also great. I’d do this in October through December too.

Same thing with Meta, cross check data points to see if there is a substantial amount of people getting into the final round with Bloomberg.

Do note that Bloomberg for interns / new grads is all 3 technical rounds + hiring manager, so you can’t go in unprepared.

This also means, that if you are debating to apply as an intern vs a new grad, it won’t matter, so might as well just do as new grad.

Thankfully all their questions tend to be about medium leetcode questions, so nothing crazy and much less intense than Meta.

The Bloomberg emails I have is not necessarily updated, but worth a try, and also potentially reaching out to people who are in the process or got the offer from Bloomberg who are willing to share.

Bloomberg about 1 or 2 years ago, was mainly only looking at other top FAANGs in my opinion, or people with more experience, but usually they are more open to take anyone for internship / new grad who is a student. I think just during the economic downturn during the last 1-2 years, they were a lot more careful, but before that I had seem them have way more openings and hiring across the board and spectrum. I feel is changing cause I know a couple people with varying degrees of background who have gotten Bloomberg new grad this past year.

In my how to actually get the interviews at big tech, one of the effective mechanics can be cold emailing a first-point-of-contact-recruiter for new grad / interns. But I wanted to dive deeper into it here

So why cold email? Well, because cold emailing can be an effective way to expedite your job application process. CSCareersDev has a helpful guide on how to cold email recruiters. Additionally, the Mailpanion Chrome extension can be useful for tracking whether your emails are being opened, which essentially lets you track people opening your emails. (Edit: Mailpanion died, can do some googling for other similar email tracker tools).

The only note is do not go reading your own emails after you send it by looking on a different device and triggering that initial read notification. But even if you do, it still displays all the open times later on! Highly recommend this extension so you know if your email was even opened and if you need to follow up etc! And at least you aren’t working off of blind information.

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Common Mistakes

1. Make sure you already apply to the company’s website first. This is b/c they need to have you in the system. So you can always be like, “hey, I applied under this email + name”, but here is my resume again, could you help me expedite this process.

2. A big thing is do not say you have a “deadline” when you are just trying to get an interview. B/c depending how you phrase it, maybe a company cannot meet a deadline. Ex. you already have an offer and you need to get this done in two weeks - that just doesn’t make sense to how the company is able to move you so fast (unless you really are under such a time crunch then I guess you can risk it). Instead just say you are in the process, and would like to interview with them. If they ask you further you can just say, “I have no current deadline, but I am still in the process with other companies. If a hard deadline comes up, I will let you know”.

   1. Being able to say you are in “process with other companies” later on during negotiations also let’s you open yourself up to bluffing that you are “finishing up” with other companies and are still “waiting to hear back” from the other company’s recruiter.

3. Do not rush on cold emailing. For example, if you applied in September, most applications don’t really start getting processed till October 15th. So you can cold email between mid September to Oct 15th optimally, and even through November / December (but depending on the hiring season they could have been more aggressive and filled up, but always worth pursuing! Even through very aggressive hiring season I’ve seen this work as late as late November). Push it a bit early (or just see if others are hearing back at a high rate already) before you start cold emailing.

   1. My other article on CSCareers shows you how to take advantage of group sourced data points

4. Don’t beat around the bush with cold emailing. Just be as direct and forward as possible. A lot of people always think its about “building a connection”, and having a “talk”, which all of that is a waste of time and can often have you ignored or the recruiter not even sure what you are asking for.

How to Email

Personally, I like to be straight forward:

Subject Line: 2025 Summer Intern | NYU | Justin

Hi _,

My name is [Name] and I am a [insert year] student at [insert school], studying [insert major] with a specialization in [insert specialization e.g full-stack web development]. I am currently in the process of interviewing with other companies, including [company name], (optionally: and have also previously interned with [insert company e.g. Bloomberg / Amazon]).

I was wondering if there was a possibility to expedite my process to get an OA or phone interview, or get an approximate timeline for when I can expect to hear back. I would greatly appreciate any assistance you can provide.

Best,

[Insert Name]

Concise

To be honest, I even like it more concise.

SUBJECT LINE: NG 2025 | NYU | Justin

Hi _,

My name is [Name] and I am a [insert year] student at [insert school].

I am currently in the process of interviewing with other companies, including [company name], (optionally: and have also previously interned with [insert company e.g. Bloomberg / Amazon]).

I was wondering if it be possible to expedite my process and get an OA or phone interview to better align the process with other companies. I would greatly appreciate any assistance you can provide.

All the best,

[Insert Name]

Can attach your resume as: [Process, school, name].pdf

File: NG_2025_NYU_Justin.pdf

Pivot to a different recruiter:

If the recruiter you are emailing, you are unsure if they are the best point of contact, maybe you haven’t confirmed they are first-point-of-contact you can also ask them to redirect you:

**SUBJECT LINE:**

Hi,

My name is [Name] and I am a [insert year] student at [insert school], studying [insert major] with a focus on [insert specialization/skillset]. I am currently going through the interview process with several companies, including [insert company name].

I am wondering if I could expedite my process or get an approximate timeline for when I can expect to hear back. I have applied for the position [position title/ID] with the email [email address] and have attached my resume for reference.

If you are unable to assist me, would you be able to forward me to a recruiter who may be able to help expedite my application or update me on the status of my application as I would love the opportunity to interview.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

Best regards,
[Name]

What is the thought process?

1. The first thought process is to introduce myself and speciality.

2. The second is to try to give a reason as to why I am trying to expedite the process (b/c I am in process with other companies) + also try to name drop a decent company so that they think this person is at least somewhat legitimate and has a chance to get through the interview process.

3. Also, if I have any name-brand experience before to drop those names

4. And finally, in a new line / paragraph, so that it isn’t mixed in as a big paragraph say my ask: which is to get an OA or phone interview.

   1. If not, can I get an “approximate timeline” so I may follow up in the future.

5. If the recruiter tells you that “oh the process hasn’t started”, etc etc. and actually gives you a timeline (tbh I usually just get ghosted or get expedited)then you can follow up with:

   1. Great! I’ll follow up in a month or whatever timeline they give you.

   2. You can also ask at this point, is the best way to just contact them through this email? Do they also potentially have another recruiter you could also get the email of or a team catch-all email, in case you lose contact with them?

When to Email

So as I said above, I would follow up once you have applied and the season is actually going on. So for example, if you applied in September, then most people probably start getting OAs / interviews in October, double check with CSCareers though since every company can obviously be a bit different. Just don’t get so overly anxious to jump on to email immediately as soon as the job drops, you apply, and then suddenly turn around and ask if you can have an interview.

If you are already later in the process though, I would follow up in a week’s time. Example, I had a mentee we cold emailed Meta on December 10th, and followed up around December 15th. This is b/c we had just received a first-point-of-contact email from a different friend, and b/c is so late in the season / close to holidays / seems to be picking up, we decided to just immediately after a few days email. (Which then resulted in a response > an interview > team matching > and offer!)

If you are in industry, I think 1 week to 1.5 week waiting is fine. You don’t need to wait so long.

When to send the email actually:

Personally, anytime during the work week is fine. If you have the option, scheduling it on Monday at 8 am I think is good. Keeps you at the top of the inbox, 5 work days for them to potentially look at it, and a bit before someone usually starts working.

Success Rates for Emailing

Emailing is hit or miss, for some companies they are better, for some companies they are worst. For example, I found that for Meta the first-point-of-contact emailing tended to work 80% of the time for mentees, with some mentees being ghosted but many hearing back.

Some other companies like Microsoft almost never work. With Google, extremely hit or miss, usually doesn’t work.

I’ve seen someone chase down 4 different Doordash recruiters and actually get an interview.

So these things do depend! So if you fail once, don’t feel discouraged and can always try again / try a different email.

I try to keep this article below updated, with recruiter emails I have + experiences I have with them + notes on them. So feel free to check this out. As the season progresses more into season (right now is August when writing this) so when September - December, I’ll naturally get more data points.

Personal Examples that Worked:

Example is an email I wrote to Facebook below when I had a Google offer. Not saying that you need to do it this way, and the way I wrote it was a bit needy, but I was in a hurry to try to get a counter offer to Google.

**New Grad | SDE I @Amazon | Google Team Matching | Bloomberg Offer**

Hi _,

My name is Justin, and I applied to Facebook / Meta for the software engineer new grad position. I only graduated from _ in late May _, but have been working at Amazon as an SDE I since _.

I'm also currently in the product area/team matching phase for Google new grad and have an offer from Bloomberg for a new grad position too.

I was wondering if there was any way to schedule a phone interview or final round with Meta as I am interested in the opportunity, and I thought I had applied (but just applied again in case if the first application didn't go through) and been awaiting a response, but it seems like I haven't gotten any.

I'm ready to interview ASAP if it is possible, or whatever it is that I would need to do if I could have the opportunity. I have no hard-deadline right now, but would love to go through the process as fast as possible.

Thank you for your time,

Justin Lin

Potential Rewrite if I had the opportunity:

Hi _,

My name is Justin and I recently applied for the software engineer new grad position at Facebook / Meta. I graduated from _ in May and have been working as an SDE I at Amazon since _. I'm currently in the product area/team matching phase for a new grad position at Google and have received an offer from Bloomberg.

Is it possible to schedule a phone interview or final round with Meta? I am very interested in the opportunity and would be available to interview as soon as possible. I have re-applied to ensure my application was received.

Thank you for considering my request.

Best, Justin Lin

Mentee Emails:

Interview Status New Grad? | Company A & Company B Finals 

Hi ___, 

My name is ____, and I applied to Meta for the software engineer new grad position under ____. I graduated(or graduating) in ____, [(if applicable) and I am currently working at (company) as an (SWE)] with previous internship experience at (COMPANY A) and (COMPANY B).

B/c I am currently in the process with CompanyA and CompanyB, I would like to know if it is possible to schedule an OA / phone interview with Meta or know the status of my application. 

Attached is a copy of my resume that I had applied with. 

Thank you for your time, 

NAME NAME

Less Frill Email - More Direct:

Interview Status New Grad? | Company A & Company B Finals 

Hi ___, 

My name is ____, and I applied to Meta for the software engineer new grad position under ____. I graduated(or graduating) in ____.

I was wondering is it possible to expedite the interview process and schedule an OA with Meta, as I am looking to complete the interview as soon as possible due to also interviewing with other companies.

Attached is a copy of my resume that I had applied with. 

Thank you for your time, 

NAME NAME

Other great resources:

https://www.nicksingh.com/posts/cold-email-tips-to-land-your-dream-job-with-examples

https://www.cscareers.dev/blog/landing-software-engineer-interviews-through-cold-emailing

So first.. what is CSCareers?

https://www.cscareers.dev/process-tracking

It’s a discord server you can join, by clicking the banner on the top that says “Join Discord”, where it has a large collection of CS people. It’s a bit of a “meme” server, but it is really helpful for one thing that is super amazing which is process tracking!

Basically by clicking on example 2025 intern summer, 2025 new grad, so on, you are able to see all the people running commands in the server to note that they are in the OA, Phone, Final Round, Offers.

And so what I mean is that when there is more consistent streams of offers for Google, Meta, Amazon, so on, when you see there is a good amount of people in the final round, then yes - it could be time to start cold emailing, expecting an OA, reaching out to people on the server to see if you could trade emails for other first-point-of-contact emails so on!

So please, utilize such an amazing resource + help contribute back to the community. No one likes a leach.

This is going to be an article focused primarily on how to get good at the technical interview for FAANG. (Ignoring system design - which is for mid to senior level devs). So this article is primarily geared towards interns / new grads / those who haven’t ever studied Leetcode before.

First.. what is the technical interview?

Technical interviews for tech companies, tend to primarily focus on “Leetcoding”, which is essentially coding algorithm questions.

What is the problem?

“Leetcoding” as a beginner sucks. If you have tried to study technical interviews before, many people encourage Leetcode as the primary resources, thus why the genericization of the term “just leetcode”.

But here is the problem with Leetcode, do you study calculus by doing 100 calculus questions? No! You don’t.

You study calculus by reading the chapter first, understanding what you can, doing the practice problems, and iterating on your understanding.

The problem with Leetcode is that doing a bunch of loosely related problems with no strong foundation ultimately will lead you to wasting a lot of time.

Prerequisite:

Before I jump into what I recommend to study with, you do need a basic understanding of data structures. What is an array, what is the time complexity to pop() and push() to an array, what is a hash-map, so on. If what I said doesn’t make sense to you, then you should learn some basic data structures first. Udemy is a great option, Youtube, Neetcode, Algoexpert, so on.

Personally, I had a basic concept having taken data structures and algorithms in college, but being really bad at it, so I just bought a cheap course from Udemy, and reviewed the concept on a as-needed basis. But if you have absolutely no understanding of data structures you should first learn that.

1. Jose Portilla course on Udemy for Python. I felt it helpful for beginners.

2. This is also another upcoming Udemy course by Elshad, that also seems good.

Honestly, anything on Udemy with good review is probably quite decent, and with a 30 day return policy, you can always return if it doesn’t fit your style.

Language to Use

Python is the easiest in my opinion to learn. Versus C++ and Java which tends to be more verbose, Python is great for interviews due to the speed, ease, and a lot of built in functions. Obviously, if you have your own language you prefer, go for it. But I tended to move all my mentees to pick up Python, within 1-2 weeks as they studied with me, and they found significant improvement in speed of solving just due to less verbosity and being able to focus more on pure logic than static typing.

Feel free to use whatever you want though - this is just a personal opinion for the average person out there I feel Python is great for interviews.

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Study Time

In my opinion, the best amount of time to study before your first OA around 1.5 months to 2 months, and 3-4 months for your first interview. This is just my opinion that around this time is where most people really begin to have a good amount of time to let the knowledge settle.

This is assuming about 4 days to 5 days a week studying, at least 2-4 hours a day. Obviously the more the better, since the time is limited, and the more time dedicated studying efficiently the better. By more time I mean more days. More than 2-4 hours I think can cause burn out and be counter productive. So I’d max around 4 hours for a day.

This article covers more in depth on the actual application timelines + when to apply + the different situations you might be in.

Tips on How to Study

The first thing, is I really recommend watching this video. It gives a great breakdown of how “studying” works in my opinion between the idea of order of learning, encoding and decoding, so-on.

But if anything, what I want to point out is that most people for “Leetcode” only ever hit the idea of “remember”. The idea of how many problems do I need to grind, struggling to “remember” the solution, and trying to “remember” how to do questions - rather than focusing on all the above.

So I highly recommend when studying, try to study with a friend, teach someone else, teach each other, and take the time to “really understand”.

Personally, I found the most improvement teaching other people and my rate of improvement exponentially grew. Even recording yourself every once in the while doing a “mock”, I challenge you to see how you would critique yourself.

Study Resources

Thus… why I recommend..

Grokking the Coding Interview by Design Guru (affiliate link). Do not buy the one from Educative.io that is outdated course, and the company in my opinion has exploitive UI design, trying to trick you into a year subscription versus DesignGuru (the original author) has taken their course to their own platform and has kept it updated.

(P.S There is another company called HelloInterview that is free to use (!!) potentially as comparatively good as Grokking, that I don’t have experience using, but I’ll also add a review on at the end).

Note:

I do want to emphasize Grokking is not an end-all-be-all, you can easily fall into the same trap of still doing Grokking, reading the solution, and moving on. I just believe that it leans towards encouraging, you to analyze more, but it still requires you to actually sit down and analyze, which is exhausting.

I do want to note though, any resource can be great, as much as I critique them below, as long as you analyze, and my path is not the ONLY path. It’s just a path that I advocate for, but there is no right answer to get you to the end goal. I am only sharing what I taught my mentees and myself as to what I found the most consistent.

Note 2 (2025)

As of 2025, I now recommend that I think HelloInterview is more than sufficient and free! It’s beautifully written, I think is as comparable to Grokking.

Realistically, everything I say about Grokking is also applicable to HelloInterview which I link to at the end

Okay, so why do I recommend Grokking the Coding Interview:

First Cost:

Comparatively to Leetcode, which is 35 dollars a month, or 160 dollars a year, Grokking is cheaper to start off with during their 40% off sale (~80 dollars), 30% sale (~90 dollars) - the 30% sale is usually always on while the 40% sale is around like holidays so-on.

Second Structure:

Grokking the Coding Interview is broken up into a distinctive pattern structure.

And this is why I really recommend it versus other resources such as Neetcode.io, Algoexpert, so on. Which are all great in their own right, but I think other resources are better suited to supplementary resources than Grokking which should be the core.

Having it in chapter forms in patterns, allow you to relate problems to a stronger core foundation. Ex. I could tell you this is everything under calculus, this is everything under algebra but this is very broad and not helpful of a statement. Or I could tell you that this is “integrals”, this is “derivatives”, this is whatever.

The more nuanced perspective is helpful and I believe Grokking has that - not to just generalize to just “arrays”, and “graphs”, but the actual specific sub-pattern implementations that utilize those data structures.

I think this is most noticeable where if you do Leetcode, let’s say for a week or a month, you might think of problems as distinct from one another, trying to “memoize” the solution for all the problems. Versus Grokking, the idea becomes “what is the pattern”, “how to apply this pattern”, “how to extend from this pattern”.

Third how does this compare against…

1. Neetcode

2. Cracking the Coding Interview

3. Blind75

4. Leetcode

5. Algoexpert

6. More…

Okay, so I’ll reiterate, my opinion is that all of these other resources tend to focus more on “data structures” versus pattern. Their explanation might be better, for example, Neetcode got amazing explanations. But the problem is their course tends to be broken down much more (generally) into broader data structures such as tree, graphs, arrays, so on, versus like the different utilization of BFS, flood-fill, sliding window, topological sort, so-on.

Versus Grokking the Coding interview does so! So my opinion is that these are great SUPPLEMENTAL RESOURCES, b/c Grokking is by no means PERFECT, but Grokking is overall the best in my opinion.

Personally for me, I used to study 5 days grokking, 1-2 days a different resource such as Algoexpert, Neetcode, Leetcode. Adjust as you see fit for whatever you find appropriate to push your boundary.

Grokking serves as a core practice, while other resources can challenge you in terms of new problems, patterns, methodology. I wouldn’t go beyond two resources at any given time though, just because you begin to jump around too much.

Fourth… HUGE NOTE!! How many questions / sections per day?

Just need to emphasize this again, Grokking is not perfect. I definitely know for some people at first it can be overwhelming especially if you are not familiar with coding in your language of choice, or know some data structure basics such as arrays and time / space complexity. I recommend to try their free problems that are available to get a sense of it.

But anyways, with that said, how many questions should you do per day for Grokking? Let’s say that a section has about 10 to 12 problems. I tend to do about 2-3 problems a day, spending about 2-4 hours studying. Sometimes I do more, sometimes I do less, but with my mentees who I previously taught directly, what we do is:

1. We read the problem

2. We take 5-10 minutes to think about our thoughts - if we think we know it we try to code it out

3. We then read the solution

4. Try to code it out after knowing the solution

5. Try to then understand / explain it

6. Try to code it out ourselves

7. Try to understand for #6 what did we miss if anything, write down some basic notes

8. Make a note of what we learnt by verbally talking, try to code it again maybe with just basic notes for reference. (No code for notes however. The challenge here is trying to relay back our words to code.)

9. If we continue to struggle make a note to revisit this in the future.

10. You don’t necessarily need to code it 3 times here. The main thing is adjust as needed depending on your understanding. The idea is mainly if you get it, maybe all you need is to discuss it + code it once. Maybe all you need is to read the solution, figure out where you went wrong, and code for practice. What I want to warn is deluding yourself that you know it and moving on too quickly.

Every 2-3 sections, we revisit the challenge problems or a particular problem in the section that we had a problem with.

I do recommend when studying, always think about when you always think about “how would you go about re-finding the solution” if you forgot it. And applying the framework below. Maybe you don’t need to do it for every problem, but at least the challenge problems per section is a great place to take the time to do it.

I do recommend don’t make it about the number of problems you solve - unless you are just really slow. Personally, when I studied with my first mentee we study 2 hours, break for 30 mins to an hour, study 2 hours.

This is just so that we were putting in the time in uninterrupted longer session, but also letting our brain then recover with some bantering and exploration of other topics, before going back to studying.

Repetition and Learning - why you need time!

The other thing is it is super normal as the study video talks about, that you will lose about 50% to 80% of the information you study after a day. This is why repetitive learning is important, b/c after you lose let’s say 50% knowledge, you then build up step by step.

So the nice thing is let’s say you do 3 problems in a section for Grokking for a day, even though you will forget parts of it tomorrow, you reinforce it by doing more problems in the same section the next day, and so on.

Then every 3 sections or so, you can do the challenge problems as a sort-of “review”.

So the idea of learning is it is okay to forget information, we just need to iterate to build it back up, make the encoding/decoding of knowledge stronger + then use analysis to rediscover any remaining information we might have forgotten!

Be okay with forgetting it is super normal! And I wish that we move away from the idea of “just remember leetcode problem” and move on, and focus on building this iterative process over time.

Grokking Sections in the Order I recommend it:

So I’m going to propose in my opinion, your “bang for bucks chapters”. This is really focused on “CRAM” style studying, where your time is limited, how much should you study. Obviously, you may disagree with me, you might want to do more or less, so-on. What I say is not end-all-be-all, I’m just giving you my opinion cause I have many people I taught in the past, where time is of the essence.

Section 1: (70% of what you need to know)

This section covers what I believe are is 70% of what you need to know for interview - arrays, strings, trees/graphs. This tends to have huge overlap across all problems you study.

1. Introduction / Warmup

2. Two pointers

3. Sliding Window

4. Merge Intervals

5. Stacks

6. Monotonic Stacks

7. Hashmap

8. Breath First Search

9. Depth First Search

10. Backtracking

11. Graphs

12. Number of Islands

13. Greedy algorithm

Section 2 (20% more)

Section 2 is what I believe are more advanced patterns that are still great to learn. From pointers, reverse linkedlist, heaps, subsets, binary search, so on, these are definitely still very common patterns that come up.

1. Fast and Slow pointer (nice to have, but never really had this come up)

2. In place reverse of a LinkedList

3. Two Heaps

4. Subsets

5. Modified Binary Search

6. Top K

7. K way merge

8. Trie

9. Topological Sort

10. Ordered Set

Section 3 (8%)

These are certainly more rare problems, that are a more good to know. I wouldn’t say these would ever make or break you though, and rarely come up.

1. Cyclic Sort

2. Union Find

3. Ordered Set

4. Prefix Sum

Section 4: (2%)

Almost useless to learn. DP is great as an introduction to understand, but I wouldn’t overemphasize on this. Bitwise, has never come up for me (for OA or live interviews) practically useless but an (?) interesting thing for some people.

1. Dynamic Programming (introduction to DP could be helpful)

2. Bitwise (almost useless)

HelloInterview!

HelloInterview seems like a new great resource. It seems to follow closely to Grokking paradigms, with just as great of visuals (if not in some cases I argue better). While I think Grokking is more “comprehensive”, I think for the core mechanics of studying, HelloInterview on my brief look through it, looks just as great.

Sections are well subdivided, organized, explained well. I think the only part I would change is push Dynamic Programming to the bottom of the ordering they have, but otherwise I don’t have large complaints with their ordering.

I consider HelloInterview, a lighter version of Grokking and a GREAT thing to use along side it OR as a FULL ALTERNATIVE. I am 100% sure it’s visuals will be greatly beneficial and super good.

This is an article on my recommendation for credit cards.

I’ll try to summarize as easily as possible. But the idea is trying to help optimize you for the future if you don’t have that many credit cards right now.

Note though in the beginning, making too many personal card openings can generate a lot of hard inquiries temporarily hurting your credit score. (Is okay though, b/c the primary things that affect your credit score over time is credit card age + no late payments), but don’t over do it.

ALSO, I CANNOT STRESS THIS ENOUGH, if you do not plan to pay off the credit card in full every statement, no 0% APR shenanigans, DO NOT GET A CREDIT CARD. Honestly, I don’t want to encourage people to just fall into credit card debit, b/c you do not want to be one of the millions of Americans struggling to survive their debt. So please, skip this article if you have no self control, or planning to somehow “game the system” by trying to make minimum balance payments so on.

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That said, let’s begin:

Chase

Some things to note of is that Chase only allows 5/24 cards, meaning 5 personal cards in 24 months, and if you are at 5 or over, they will reject all your applications with them. Meaning that you should be careful of this as you open some personal cards.

Freedom Unlimited

I recommend to get the Chase Ink Freedom Unlimited

NerdWallet Article

It gets you started into the Chase ecosystem, of the ultimate reward points, which I think are really important since Chase has the most flexible transfer partners in the game. The reward percentage is okay, but again, is just to get started into the Chase ecosystem.

This is a $0 dollar annual fee card.

Apple Card

If you have the ability to get an Apple Card, I highly recommend it. You can if it asks you for income, just put 100K, without proof, and get approved, which is what I did as a freshmen in college. You still get started out with a very low credit limit (mine back then was like 2K or 3K), so it helps you build your credit, but I love it b/c it’s 2% back on everything apple pay, and 3% back on things like Uber / Uber eats.

It also, in my opinion, very transparent about it’s design, on how much you need to pay off, and makes it very easy.

It really was a great card. The other thing I love about it is that I can refresh my card number, letting me exploit infinite free trials:

This is a $0 dollar annual fee card.

Bilt Card

Bilt card, is a great card for rent! If you don’t know already, it basically gives you an account and routing number, which you can provide to your apartment’s portal! By doing so, you basically don’t need to pay any credit card or debit card fee, and Bilt basically every time you pay rent get 1% back in points.

You do need to make 5 total transactions per statement for you to receive the point, but I just buy 5 x 2 dollar apple gift cards, or I just go to the grocery store and check out the items individually.

It also has 3x back on dining, and 2x back on groceries.

This is a $0 dollar annual fee card.

This is a great card for beginners.

Citi Double Cash

Citi double cash is an easy card that is competitive to Apple, since you get 2% back on everything. It’s simple, easy, and basically a free discount.

This is a $0 dollar annual fee card.

Tips

If your parents can add you as an authorized card user to their credit cards, it increases your credit card average age significantly. Since it basically looks as if you had the credit card for as many years as your parents have had it.

In the future cards…

In the future, if you get more advanced, Amex Gold / Amex Platinum are great cards to look into if you have high food cost / high flight costs. These are more advance though, since they have an annual fee and you must know if it makes sense for your spending habit.

Also Chase Preferred vs Chase Reserve cards, are two options to look towards once you get more into traveling. Personally, I have the Chase Preferred since it has some better redemption options for my Chase points, and I find that the Reserve basically is a worst version of my Amex platinum personally to me.

Resumes tend to be the hardest for people who are inexperienced. If your resume has two columns, graphics, pictures, lots of white spaces, not standard template, it is probably bad. If it has too much jargon, where people do not know what it means, or only impact driven with numbers without an explanation of what you did and the challenges, it isn’t good enough.

The content should be 1 page, digestible, and the most important things.

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Note:

At a certain point, it also isn’t worth grinding a resume too much. If you reach a point where your resume is “solid enough”, like a 75/100, or 80/100, or more, then you’re good! In my opinion, the resume is not the end all be all for tech, rather it’s much more towards your interview performance. And there are many other things you can do to be getting the interview rather than focusing too much on making your words pretty.

ATS System

Larger companies use something called ATS, which is a resume parser, and this is why I recommend doing standard formatting, or a single-column resume. The idea is to make it easy to parse.

Saying that, your resume does not need to be 100% algorithmically perfect. Different companies use different systems, and ATS at the end of the day is not perfect. I used to over-optimize on this, but now I am of the camp that it really matters very little.

Resume Templates to Use:

1. Use Jake’s Resume Template on Latex : Latex is an easy way to get consistent nice formatting for text.

2. Use any Mac or Words template as long as it fits the single column criteria

If you don’t have enough to talk about:

There is no excuse. You can literally pick up Udemy courses, go to Youtube, do more projects. Sometimes, if your resume sucks, it just really sucks cause you just don’t have enough to talk about, and that is your signal to go do more. Programming is the one field where it is totally valid to do your own thing.

Bullet points and Common Problems:

This is a great article here about how to write good bullet-points. But I will state the common problems.

• Often people use too much jargon - especially if in research roles

• Focus too much on soft skill

• Try to stuff in too many numbers

• Try to stuff in too much technology: ex. I used Python, Numpy, and AWS Lambda to do X. But usually that tells me nothing about “how you did it” other than you magic-wave your hand and something happened.

• Too much adjectives back to back, such as, “effectively and efficiently increased productivity by 33% through [more adjectives]”

• Useless points that don’t say much about you as an engineer such as, “lead project”, “communicated expectations”

For example, someone might say:

• Demonstrated leadership by leading SCRUM meetings

• Increased project efficiency by 30% by implementing meeting notes

• Implemented an distributed-network protocol that interacted with <Insert proprietary technology> that <insert more proprietary terms>

Why is this bad? B/c as a newbie what they want to see is mainly technical skills. Not leadership, not that you can talk, not random numbers you pulled out of no where. Imagine you are trying to hire a junior engineer: do you hire the person who can lead the meeting? Or do you hire the person who knows the framework you are working with?

Also some people often focus too much on making their sentences too short, I also think this is a problem.

Thus… writing bulletpoints

Other than the article I link that goes more in depth, here are the two ways I recommend to write:

Challenge Format:

This is more for beginners, since some of my mentees really are just bad at writing, so I gave them this format just to have something easy to follow.

1. What did you do

2. What were the challenges

So if we deconstruct the above my mentee took a course she did on Vue, and said:

1. She built a full stack application so people can see where their friends are at

2. Challenges included … [the challenges she had]

Easy, simple, to the point.

Deconstructive writing

Another way to write more in length and better is to focus on the: what you did, why you did, and how you did it.

Especially the HOW - I find a lot of people missing that which is the most important! B/c again, based off my personal philosophy, as a more junior developer you are trying to demonstrate your technical capabilities.

I worked on a react project to design a dashboard.

Can be improved by writing:

What did I do: I designed a React UI dashboard

Why did I do it: To parse incoming data stream that I had coming from customer data

How did I do: I used React and live visualization modules to display it in a more intuitive manner, and had challenges such as implementing file parsing.

Example reworked:

I developed a React UI dashboard to visualize datasets for our customers. Used D3js to manipulate graphics, and dealt with challenges such as file parsing thousands of data points.

Other variations could be:

Developed a UI dashboard to visualize datasets for our customers. Challenges included dealing with file parsing datapoints and efficiently plotting the datapoints.

Ultimately:

There are tons of ways to write datapoints. I am not saying that my methodology is the “correct” way. But it is an “easier” framework I give to people to just help them have a guide rail to get to a decent stage.

Overview To Specific

Another technique is writing a higher level overview the first bulletpoint and then driving the details later.

Ex.

• Implemented a neural network that was able to predict video click through rate for youtube videos.

• Implemented clientside chrome plugin for users to do XXX resulting in XXX

• Implemented the network to do YYY depending on ZZZ.

• Developed dev-op pipeline to deploy models to XXX customers and scaled memory by YYY.
  

Where to Put Technology:

One of the problems, I want to directly address is a lot of times people write things as:

• Implemented features using some magic technology.

And this will repeat on for the whole resume. To fix this issue, try to use a separate dedicated bullet point for just:

• Technologies: X, Y, Z

Or put it in the header of the job.

Position | Company | Technology: Firebase, SQL, Python, …

That way you don’t feel the need to stuff it everywhere.

Note:

Not every single point needs to be written this way. For example, your first point could be the project, and following points more details:

1. Implemented a project that allowed XYZ

2. <deconstructive writing>

I also find that if you find yourself stuffing technologies into your bullet point, maybe consider putting the technologies in the header of the job / subtitle / as it’s own bullet point. That basically helped me not feel the need to spam what I used.

Common Questions:

1. What if I don’t have number to say? You can use qualitative descriptions such as: improved experience, so on.

2. Do I need to have work experience?

   1. No

3. Should work experience unrelated be above projects?

   1. I personally put projects on the top, and as I gained more projects, I deleted irrelevant work experience.

Summary:

1. Get more projects if you don’t have it

2. Focus more on the things that matter

3. As a junior developer you should be more focusing on proving can you contribute to writing code rather than driving org wide impact. (Which will also naturally come once you become more senior)

Follow up:

One of the things I see a lot of time is that people just don’t have that many good projects on resume. Especially for high schoolers entering college, or even being in college, if you haven’t been focused on improving yourself technically then that is a big problem.

My opinion is going to be based to have a foundation in full-stack web development, or some part of it. Why? (B/c I’m biased and I did full-stack web development). But also b/c I believe it serves as a generic knowledge foundation for other fields. Now, if you are into low level embedded, robotics, microcontrollers, dev-ops, mobile great! Go for it! All of those are super valid, and you should do what interests you. But sometimes, especially for people starting out, they have zero knowledge where to start, and this is meant to help those people.

Are these projects good enough for FAANG? Yes. I’ve taught many mentees, whose resume especially as freshmen / sophomore / junior year, consists of just projects built from the foundations of what I talk about in this article. Obviously, the most successful ones are those who take the knowledge further, but for a first internship this is more than enough (seeing people get internship from JP Morgan Chase to Amazon to Microsoft). Even myself, for a long time I mainly just had primarily projects on my resume until I was able to get more work experience.

Moving onwards in this article, I will be referring to Udemy courses, I am not sponsored by them, I just think they are the cheapest method for you to get guidance on establishing knowledge, and then you can go out there and use the projects you learn in the course, adapt them, or use them to build other projects. If you want to, go ahead and use Youtube and the million of other free articles and resources that the programming community has created. I just personally, like video courses where the creator also has a financial incentive to be a great teacher. And considering how cheap it is + the refund policy for Udemy, made sense for me. If it doesn’t, there are tons of resources out there you can do for free with just a simple Google Search.

Projects you can do:

1. Python Developer

   1. THIS IS MORE SO FOR BEGINNERS and for people who don’t want to do web dev, want a starting point for backend, and just wants to get started. But you will need to extend more than just basic python scripting at some point. Maybe after this look more into Go-lang projects, or other backend languages / projects.

   • Scripting with the Python section under this course is a great place to just instantly gain 4 projects in 3 hours that you can immediately put on your project.

   • Specifically here are some ways that I think you could sell some of the projects on the scripting course. The idea is ultimately just to think of any sort of application, ex. emailing and SMS automation can be used for a lot, web scraping can be used for a lot, mass pdf correction and watermarking can be used for a lot, figure out how to make your project interesting, and discuss the technical aspects that went into it:

     • Created an automated emailing and SMS system in order to automatically process club events and do system-wide announcements to club members within certain groups about events. Difficulties included XYZ

     • Created a web scraper in order to scrape through school classes and help generate a list of possible classes to take. Difficulties included... XYZ

     • Use Python to generate automatic deal listings from Craiglist that they SMS me a message.

   • Note: the course does get more intermediate at latter points with different backend services such as Django, Flask, Numpy, and other great introductions and decent projects. Just I know most people tend to drop out after getting to SMS, but it is up to you if you want to continue

2. Build Web Apps with Vue JS and Firebase

   • Also another great course with 3 full-stack web apps, all written in Vue, and very easy to learn quickly. You probably won’t know what you are doing completely but a good dive into Vue and you can go deeper into it through other Vue courses but this one you come out with three solid projects to start with. I recommend Vue bc a lower learning curve than React, much lower.

   • One of my first several mentees she did this course, and ended up getting Amazon + Meta afterwards. This was for a long time the projects she put on her resume b/c before that she only had tutoring / TAing at school.

3. I ALSO HIGHLY RECOMMEND ZERO TO MASTERY ACADEMY (affiliate link):

   1. I used to be a mentor in it! But it is one of the best places I think where the academy monthly pricing gives a lot of access to the Python Developer course, React Developer course, a Mastering the Coding interview course, and a Big Tech Coding interview course so it definitely is more cost-effective I feel in terms of resources and very high quality!

   2. They also have many of their courses still on Udemy, which you can purchase, so if the full academy is too expensive, just go to Udemy! You are in no way compelled to use their academy.

4. My personal path: I learned from the Complete Web Developer Course:

   • Zero to Mastery Complete Web Developer course

   • Which if you want to go down the React route versus Vue, I think is an amazing course and where I first got started. But this course is very large and thorough and isn’t maybe as short-term as the other courses above if you are just looking to build a resume. This is more for a foundation as a developer, and less so for interviewing short-term. You build a full-stack web app from scratch, learn React and Nodejs and Postgresql and make a face detection website.

   • You can go through this course first to learn fundamentals before diving into a framework your choices like continuing down React or Vue.

   • Note: they used to have the course on Udemy, but they took it off. I highly recommend, any other instructor on Udemy who also have great rating to consider looking into them.

Note: While most the above are all hacky ways to fill your resume, I do think at some point, do try to pick a specialty.

More…

Literally, just start with any Udemy project. Maximillian, Zero to Mastery, Stephen Grider, Angela Yu, are all great teachers.

My only recommendation is DO NOT GET STUCK IN TUTORIAL HELL (meaning that you only keep doing tutorial without doing things yourself. You become stuck in a loop where you can only do work with a guided tutorial - meaning you don’t actually understand or push yourself outside that defined boundary). Just doing a tutorial doesn’t mean that you are a master, take that knowledge and push yourself deeper, explore, build projects on your own.

I love courses though b/c I think it introduces to you in a friendly way a perspective that you might not have known otherwise.

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Often times you can get cheap courses from Udemy and other SAAS products by just using a VPN. What VPN? Up to you, I just recommend a paid one rather than one those free ones that could potentially scam you.

Udemy

Udemy is always on “sale” for new users or rotates into “sale” for existing users. If you are a new user, or even if not, you can always on incognito mode, make a new account, and thus get a sale between 11.99 to 15.99.

In addition Udemy’s refund policy is extremely generous if you end up buying a course and find it just doesn’t work for you.

How to Utilize a VPN for Udemy and other SAAS

It is always worth checking if a SAAS product has dynamic pricing based on region. So if you VPN to Turkey > go to Udemy > Make an account > it will be in turkish lira making the course 50% off after conversion.

Using a card with no foreign transaction fee, you now got a really cheap course with a ton of knowledge. And if you refund the course, it still works perfectly, I’ve done this before, and you will get a successful refund on your credit card.

Warnings:

1. At low volumes you can gift to your main account, but I would highly be careful of this. I have a datapoint that doing this a lot got someone’s account banned. I personally just keep it all in my turkish accounts maybe only ever gifting 1-2 courses.

2. You can use virtual cards, but I personally just use my normal credit cards. They don’t cross check it across accounts.

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