Break Into Big Tech - Is The Grass ACTUALLY Greener?

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hey folks we're going to go to LinkedIn for an anonymous question so just a reminder if you want stuff answered you can either leave it in the comments below or uh send it over on social media if you look for Dev leader that's my main YouTube channel and my uh sort of uh Alias and personal social media handle that I use and then you can look for Nick centino on LinkedIn otherwise and uh send over stuff the more detail the better and uh so this person sent over a bunch of information we're going to talk about uh big Tech interviewing that kind of stuff so um so I said currently I have some experience I'm at this I'm at the stage where getting interviews for big tech for example and they list out a couple of uh dates and times where they had some interviews

and stuff but they're they're not really breaking in is the is the challenge here so I really want to break into big Tech and I feel like I'm at the doorstep uh they seem like they've been having some success with getting uh offers from what I would still they listed out a couple of companies I would still say very aable like you know I think that's that's awesome so they're they're not stuck in the sense where they're not getting any opportunities but it's they're kind of looking for something else and it seems to be like big Tech is the is the thing that they're trying to uh get some access to so um they talk about the interview process a little bit so um they mentioned one of the companies was lead code um which they were able to solve but not optimally uh I

made other videos before my sort of uh feelings about lead code and stuff it's like one of those things where I feel like get ready to do it an interview but I think it's personally um I don't think it translates well into actual software engineering practices nor do I feel like it's a a useful tool for interviewers to use for my experience uh they say but the other two baffle my mind they didn't ask me lead code it was more of a higher level problem solving conversation which is interesting I can't tell from this statement exact if that was more system design because I would say other times when you get like coding questions or like system design and I should say Andor because you usually get both and the system design might be like more of a distributed system type of thing and those

are generally like open-ended problem solving I find but that doesn't necessarily mean that this was system design um when I ask the coding questions in interviews that I do I don't make them lead code they are very much data structures and algorithms and they are simple and I don't I didn't pick the word easy I said simple on purpose because I don't like to say that things are easy because some people might find things easier than others but there's not a lot of complexity like objectively it's not a lot of complexity but um I do then take that and scale it up and I modify it so if people are flying through it I go great okay like let's let's add um and it's not tricks I make it very clear here if people have interviewed with me I will literally tell them I do

not give you trick questions and I will change constraints but that's not to say like haha screw you it's really to say great like thank you so far for your answer what happens if we change the constraints so I I approach things that way which may be kind of like what this person's experiencing um they said one of their interviews went overtime and they felt like they solved it conceptually um you know seemed like things went well got good feedback um some points where they got stuck but um you know interviewer asked them questions and they kept going so so overall felt like it was pretty good um in the end I got ghosted so I think number one just on on getting ghosted and stuff I don't think that it's I don't think that it's a good practice that any company ever would ghost

uh someone that they interviewed um I can't I can't speak for any any people that are doing that but even like at a minimum it's like do you not even have automation that like if you have a if you're a bigger company you have a pipeline of people coming through with automation right to be able to take in the resumés and stuff um you put them into a scheduling system where people are getting their interviews like how do you not like at a minimum have automation to say thank you but like yeah the getting ghosted stuff is like I think that's there I I just don't think there's an excuse for it um I would even say like I would go as far as saying even if you interviewed a candidate as a company you interviewed a candidate and you were like man that person

really sucked we would never hire them I would still make sure to be able to send something I just it feels like not right to me I can't think of a good excuse to defend organizations that don't do that that's why I was saying like you can't even say oops I forgot it's like how do you at a minimum not have automation for that but anyway um they didn't end up getting roles that way and these are for big tech companies um and they said maybe some other similar occurrences with another one said maybe I should be happy where I'm at and the grass isn't greener on the other side but I have a dream to get into one of those top companies and I feel like I'm knocking at the door any tips um so yeah let's talk about this I think uh I

think it's a challenging one um and when I say challenging I mean like to kind of be going through an experience like that um also want to mention like said this in a couple videos that I've done earlier this week I'm like completely burnt out um and it's the tail end of the week I was hoping that getting a little bit more sleep and stuff would like help reset I'm hopeful that having a weekend will help with that um if it doesn't then I'm not really sure um but I know I know all this kind of stuff from going through burnout before is not like a it's not permanent I know everything has sort of a timeline to it so uh I'm just trying to be transparent like these are vog entry so I if I'm going through periods where I'm kind of feeling like

I don't want you to I kind of I want you to understand what I'm trying to answer stuff um that any sort of state of mind I'm in automatically has a bit of a bias and stuff I'm just trying to be clear about that but um I think I think this is a good one so um where to start though number okay let's talk about grass being greener on the other side I I've also made videos on this I don't think sorry let me let me say that start it a different way I think that the phrase the grass is not always greener on the other side is very true um and I think in particular when we we have in our mind what it's like to be at a different place okay so if if you're basing everything on something that's more um like

you you've kind of created it if that makes sense like you have some vision of what it's going to be like to work at one of these companies some some big tech company Microsoft Amazon Facebook you have an idea in your mind but like you have not done it yet so are you basing that on what you think it's like or because you have people like friends and or family and you know people that are close to you that are telling you about this firsthand that you trust and understand that experience are you just going by what social media is like like I I work at Microsoft right and I'm telling you right now like sorry when I say telling you right now I mean in this video I've been telling you like I'm currently burnt out so do you watch one video of me

and you're like oh this guy works at Microsoft and he's burnt out must be shitty there no like I like the team I'm working on I like the space I'm working in I like working for my manager I've had very good work life balance like I'm going through a phase right now where I'm totally burnt out so like is your perception of this kind of stuff skewed based on what you see versus what reality is so I do very much think um the grass is greener or is not always greener on the other side is important to think about now with that said um I don't think there's anything wrong with aspiring to do something right so it's not for me to say oh like you shouldn't even try big Tech like not for you no like if if you have an interest in doing

it if that's something that you want to go achieve then I think you should try and do that I just want to like clarify for people that it's like I think you need to understand why you're trying to do it right because if it's well once I do that I'm set well no that's not true there's been lots of layoffs across different companies it's not it's not perfect right um you know you might find yourself in a position where uh though you feel like you're not engaged at work you might find yourself in a position where you're not getting the promotion trajectory um you could have a period of burnout maybe the team you're working on kind of puts you into a Perpetual state of burnout like you don't it's you don't really know these things until you're doing it so I just like I

think it's okay to set goals I think it's okay to work towards those but I would try and understand like what it is your you're actually trying to do and I I realize that's kind of a weird statement it's like what do you mean Nick what am I trying to do but so like is it and there's nothing wrong with this by the way but like is it just to be able to have the title on your resume is it because you will feel accomplished when you have sort of been granted access into big Tech and again I'm not saying there's anything wrong with wanting that that's not for me to decide I'm just trying to say I think you need to think about and be honest with yourself about what that is because I think if you're not doing that and say this person

is able to get into big Tech are they going to be disappointed right like what is the reason why they're trying to do that I have a sneeze coming on by the way it could show up at any moment so be prepared um so I think that that's an important thing to think about because say that this is a focus of theirs where they're like I have this goal I want to be able to do it if they're not understanding the clarity around that goal and then they they keep putting in all this effort are they really going to find themselves unhappy once they reach it so I to be maybe like a little bit more philosophical um like I was saying I don't think there's anything wrong with having these specific goals just to be able to say get it on your resume whatever

or to say like okay now I'm in this PID tier like I feel better totally fine like not for me to decide I think when it comes to happiness again maybe a little bit more philosophical I think that one you're going to want to make sure that you are feeling valued in terms of compensation I think that's important that number will be different for different people so it's not for me to say you got to be making at least 100K 200k 300K not for me to decide but I think you need to feel valued through compensation and part of that is also making sure that there's a standard of living that you're meeting and you're like you are feeling safe you're able to provide for your family whatever that looks like right I think there's that needs to be covered and then you need to

feel valued in terms of compensation so the amount of work you're doing like do you feel that you are being treated fairly that way so I think that's a part of it on the compensation side and notice I'm being very generic here I'm not saying like here's the number or whatever because like I said it's going to be different for everyone I think that for most people some level of autonomy some level of being challenged some level of interesting work uh growth right so I think there's sort of it's like a little bit nebulous to talk about but I think that in terms of finding fulfillment or I should I want to talk about fulfillment after so maybe let me talk about engagement right in terms of being engaged at work some balance of being challenged having autonomy this kind of stuff that's going to

look different for everyone in terms of what motivates them and gets them engaged right some people love new tech they just want to work on new tech they're happy some people really like difficult challenges where they're like okay like no one solved this yet like I'm going to be the one to do it and like they're like super motivated they can get stuck against a wall for a week and then they're like finally have a breakthrough and they love it um there's there's all sorts of different motivation and I think that's important for for you to figure out how you find that could you find that at a big tech company versus a smaller one versus some other company probably I don't think it's tied to Big Tech now on fulfillment which is what I think is important is maybe the domain or the type

of work you're doing might have a really big impact that way so uh I've talked about if I don't know who's watching this that's new to the Channel versus uh like a a new new person um but I used to work at a digital forensics company when I talk about fulfillment um from the perspective of the domain I was in I will say it like I feel like I can almost say this with like a very high degree of confidence I don't know if I will ever in my my life find work that was that fulfilling which is a pretty bold statement but like we were able to help create software to help catch pedopiles convict them was used for more things than that but like that was a big part of it to be able to help save kids I don't I just don't

know of something that feels more fulfilling than that now in my role I find fulfillment as an engineering manager where I'm able to help others around me it's why I make content like this and try to answer questions because it's like it's it's not the YouTube ad Revenue the the dollar a day that gets made kind of thing that I'm ultimately going to spend on video editing for my other channel it's not that it's because it feels good to me it's fulfilling so I want to be able to help because it feels good to me to be able to help others so I think that when we're exploring these like these job opportunities or thinking about where we want to be like I for me I think those are the types of things you want to be asking yourself like what does fulfillment look like

what is Fair compensation look like what does engagement look like because I think those things to me you can I mean I'm I'm not limiting it to that by the way like work life balance there's other factors but my point is I'm trying to give you some ideas like think about those things and then I would be asking the question does this company provide that opportunity and if it does great because one of the things they were saying is like yeah they do have some of these other opportunities that might not be big Tech should I be happy with that the answer I think is maybe again I'm not here to say like don't strive for other things but what is it that you're trying to get out of them maybe I'm just making this up but maybe for this person it's like the compensation

make Let's Pretend everything else about the job the work whatever is the exact same but the compensation's 50% more and they're like for me that's actually something that I want okay like you understand the reason again I'm not saying reason is right or wrong I just want you to understand it so um okay that's kind of what I wanted to talk about from that perspective I'm just kind of scrolling through again in terms of interviews and stuff yeah I think um let me just double check I want to make sure I can answer their questions specifically so um any tips yeah about kind of this I think it's just about this approach so um in terms of breaking into big Tech though um typically I know they were saying they had some interviews that weren't like lead code I will say brush up on the

leite code I think that's going to be like a number one type of thing in my opinion the other thing like the system design kind of questions those are the really open-ended ones I find should be asking a lot of questions that try and clarify like what the requirements are so you can be optimizing for the right things um so you're you're directing the focus to the right areas so um I think personally if you practice those types of questions are very open-ended for system design and you can cover your Elite code if you're if you're like this person and getting some questions that seem like they're maybe somewhere in the middle like maybe it's not system design but it's still kind of open-ended problem solving I feel like practicing those system design ones help with that a lot conceptually um so that would be

my recommendation on on like the technical interviewing part um you know if you if you don't know where to go online to look for example questions in this kind of stuff literally I think you can probably have success with um with asking llms like chat GPT or whatever you want to use right so hey like I am I'm this level of software developer here are the here are the tech companies I'm thinking of interviewing for could you give me five examples of um open-ended um problem solving questions for software developers at this level at these companies the the reason that I kind of like that approach is that I don't like the idea of like trying to like hack the system like how do I find the question bank that they're going to ask me because like I don't know like sure if you can

find that great um I would just really hope that you're not in the interview and you were putting you were banking on that and then you get asked something different and you were like great I just like I blew the opportunity to try and understand how to approach solving these problems just by thinking that I could memorize it so I I just don't like kind of doing that thing it's it's not something that I would ever recommend can you have success doing it sure I know people that used to do tons of lead code and you know kind of just like memorize or like practice like specific interviewing techniques for the the technical portions and they would do well and then they would tell me like I don't really know how to write software and it's not me judging them that's them telling me by

the way so um yeah I would I would practice lead code to be prepared for that and then I would make sure doing um like practicing your system design questions the you could also leverage llms in the sense where you're like um you could probably treat it like an interview like you could start a new conversation and say Here's here's a question that's like very vague and then say like I'm going to be the interview you're the interviewer and like I'm going to be asking you questions to make the you know the scenario uh more specific and you're going to tell me about the constraints as I asked them like you you can set this up for yourself the point is being able to practice navigating this kind of stuff I think is important because it is open-ended so this person doesn't talk about behavioral

interview questions which I think are a big part but I'm assuming they're not mentioning it because uh that didn't seem to be a sticking point so that's good but behavioral interview questions are a big part of this kind of stuff I always try to remind people my biggest takeaway for behavioral interview questions especially for for software developers is we need to remember that it's a behavioral interview question they are not questioning you about your Tech choices they don't need all the detail about the product and the service they don't need to know how awesome it was they don't need all the nuances I know it's like cool and exciting for you and like that's great um and I'm not I'm not saying that factiously I mean like it's great that you actually get get pumped about it but when it's a behavioral interview question you

only got so much time in the interview focus on what the goal of the question is if you don't know how to navigate this kind of stuff again you can use AI to give you example behavioral interview questions you want to make sure you're understanding from the interviewer's perspective what is it that they're trying to take away from a behavioral aspect of what I'm doing in some scenario if they say tell me about a project where and then you know you had interpersonal conflict you uh failed to meet the delivery you had um you know differences of opinions you had uh you had to motivator lead the team uh teams that were behind on deadlines like that the tell me about a project part they're not saying give me all the technical details of that they're just giving you some framing for a scenario and

then they want you to talk about one of these things you had to navigate so um practice those if you're not comfortable with those but um I think one final point for this person I'm I'm hoping that this is helpful by the way I realize it's not like I don't think I'm saying anything groundbreaking and uh I said this in a couple of videos earlier this week I think some times when people message and they ask questions um so I can't I can't say this with like a high degree of confidence because it's kind of like it's a little woo woo but sometimes I read this stuff and I'm like I think these people are doing great and um I think they're trying hard they're doing great and they're just not having good luck and I feel like if they wouldn't have messaged me if

they wouldn't have seen any content I put out and they just kept doing what they were doing that they would be successful so um I'm kind of making this to talk about some perspective and share my thoughts but I'm like I'm not I'm not going to be the person that makes the difference here I think I think that this person already is is doing you know the thing that makes a difference and kind of wanted to you know wrap it up with my closing Point here that especially for like this individual this could be this could be you two right you may have situations where you've actually interviewed very well okay so you might have aced the programming question they give you a system design or open-ended problem solving question you do a great job there by the way you don't have to get everything

perfect like this person was saying it feels like they got asked some questions they answered them they kept moving like that's great but you could be doing all of this stuff what seems like perfect you know do a great job on your behavioral interview questions the the thing is that we don't have control over everything there's always going to be factors that we don't have control over and the problem is that if it doesn't end up our way it feels like it was all our fault so in this person's case they might have had an amazing set of interviews but there's one position and there happened to be someone who also had amazing interviews what doesn't happen is that they go great we'll just hire the two people because they they scored so while on the interviews we'll just hire them both but there's no

budget for it there's no headcount on the team it won't happen and then you might say well that's unfair why wouldn't they want to hire the good talent they demonstrated it I understand it's not unfortunately it's not about like what is fair or what what seems like common sense to you and I kind of sounds shitty to say I'm not trying to be rude I'm just saying that's just like that isn't reality the reality is if they only have one head count then they can't there could be situations where a team I'm just I don't have a spe specific real example of this but there I could hypothesize situations where teams are okay we have headcount we set up all the interview rounds we're doing them and then for some reason based on their scheduling they cross over their their sort of like fiscal quarter

budget expires and they go oh I guess we I guess we actually can't hire like for whatever reason we can't hire now so that's it right they don't they don't even fill the one head count they had right so you might have done an awesome job and then you might say well why aren't they calling me back then why aren't they trying to refer to me to another open position I don't know I don't have a good explanation for that yes that does seem logical I absolutely agree that they should do that if you did so good I'm on your side but I don't have an like I don't have a reason for it so my point is that there's a lot of stuff that's not in your control and it's very very easy to blame yourself for it um and I think out of

anything I've said in this video that's the one thing that I want you to take away from it is that you could show up on one day do your absolute best and it could be truthfully it could be amazing to the people that are interviewing you and someone else on that day just might happen to be a little bit more amazing .1% better and that should not make you feel like you're worthless so I hope that little bit helps um I wanted to thank this person for sending this in and uh I yeah I hope that helps and uh if you got questions send them in and I'll see you next time take care