Also, just to give a context of the hiring bar these days. The FAANG companies coding question is no longer on Easy even on phone interview. Expect at minimum 2 Medium difficulty questions in a phone interview that need to be able to be solved in optimal space time complexity in under 45 mins (or more precisely, under 20 mins each because if the first question is not solvable under 20 mins then they will skip that and you already failed).
So for those FAANG engineers that were able to get in early, whether by acquihire, by diversity hire, by luck, by normal hire. Stay there as long as you can especially in today’s times. Because once you quit you’ll experience a rude awakening for getting right back in, unless those companies waive you in because you’ve been in before.
And yea, I’m talking for both fresh graduates as well. There are instances where a fresh graduate get 4 out of 5 hard leetcode questions in an onsite. Yea, its that crazy.
I'm strictly speaking from personal experience and by reading subreddit cscareerquestions and Leetcode forum on people's experiences.
So at this point, a lot of people (including me) already solved hundreds of Leetcode questions, and still got rejected. So this is now a luck of the draw game, apply to those companies every year (because once you get rejected then you are not allowed to apply within a year), one day you will get your lucky strike.
One way to maximize your luck if you really want to get in, assuming that you are not lucky, not part of diversity hire, not part of acquihire: - internship - contract work
Damn I have to EDIT so many times lol. But due to this Leetcode style training that a lot of us are going through, we literally have less time to learn anything else, for example, learning new libraries, new frameworks. I personally think learning new frameworks or libraries are kinda dumb because it is easy to pick up on the job anyway, but nevertheless when you want to look for a job you need these on your resume. Say you only know REST but now companies want gRPC and Protobuf then you gotta learn those on the side. Assuming that you are a normal working person with hobbies, families, responsibilities, activities on the side you need to pick your choices carefully.
So this has an interesting result. The more you prepare for FAANG and doing Leetcode style questions, the less time you prepare for mid-tier companies and the lesser the chance you will get a better offer from them. So you have to go ALL IN one way, can't go half ass one way or the other.