Hacker News Reader

Comment by ornornor | Hacker News Reader

What does it take to work for this kind of company though? I have about ten years experience, been focusing on frontend for the last few years. I have never worked at any of the big names and I have a bachelor degree that’s not in CS or mathematics but I’m a decent developer in my opinion: I write clean, testable code.

And yet the major tech players always reject me before even a screening call. Which makes me think I must be missing something in my CV or experience. But what? What are recruiters screening for at these companies?

View on HN

I'm was a full stack dev with a similar self-taught background but only 5 years experience and I just started as a Google SRE last year. Maybe it helped that I attended a lot of meetups and conferences.

> Maybe it helped that I attended a lot of meetups and conferences.

How so? Did you meet people there that were part of your recruitment process, or for another reason?

Try reaching out to recruiters directly on linkedin to enter the system instead of just submitting your resume to be auto-screened. You'll probably have to have a short screen call with them first, during which you can make the case that despite the lack of CS degree you know what you're doing, talk about your passion for that company's work etc, and it should be pretty feasible to get a true coding screen from there.

These recruiters are so used to cold-calling via email/linkedin and getting no reply, I feel they'd be pretty happy to have someone actually interested (and qualified) fall in their lap.

Maybe try different channels, like working with a different recruiter or getting a referral? For the few times I've been approached in the last few years, recruiters differ by miles for how they prepare and present you.

If you're fairly good at coding interviews, last I checked interviewing.io lets you skip the line to onsite at big names like Uber and Lyft.

You're missing a referral.

I’m not sure. I was referred by an employee several times at Shopify for instance and it did nothing for me. A referral in a lot of places is just so that the company knows who to give the referral bonus to if you’re hired but it doesn’t give you any kind of edge.

Usually a referral guarantees someone at least looks at the resume.

The nature of the referral matters.

If the referral comes from a respected engineer known to the hiring manager and the candidate is a good fit for the open position, things can move pretty quickly.

If it's just a name thrown into a pot or entered into a form in some internal system, there isn't a whole lot of internal pressure.

A strong referral can get you hired even if you fail the interview.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com