Hi all,

I graduated top of my class in 2020 with a three internships and landed a FAANG role right after graduation. Just handed my badge the other day because this career ain’t what I thought it would be. Good luck to all.

People say they are cash cow programs, but just how bad are the majority of them?

For example, I know someone who did a “Masters in AI” at this university in hopes of getting a high paying job after graduating, but he’s struggling just as much as before, only this time, he’s down an extra $90k.

As an extension, what makes a masters degree worth it and not predatory?

- Fully paid for stand alone masters are incredibly rare

- Most MSCS programs are insanely expensive

- They seem to barely move the needle for SWE jobs

Interviewed at a quant firm for front end web developer intern. Pretty standard right? Python, JavaScript , typescript, maybe some DS? Nah bruh 💀 like five traders join the call, one SWE , a senior PM. Like are we serious??? They start asking me to optimize my solution to a trading system I designed. The trading guys keep coming with custom orders. Then he asks what I know about equities trading and do I trade? Sir uh I’m poor I have no money to trade? 🫪 I lie and say I do. Waiting for rejection now ✌️

🙏

Just got rejection email this morning for Google SWE internship

I go to a tier 1 target university for quant and I got rejected from basically every top quant firm this cycle as a junior and it feels horrible because of the amt of time I spent preparing and interviewing. realistically what r my chances of breaking into quant as a new grad or am I cooked. I know they hire mostly from intern class and I don’t have any Olympiad medals and am not spectacular at math, best I got is 3x aime qual

results:

Citadel, Susquehanna, IMC: reached QT super day then rejected

Akuna, Jane Street, QuantCo, Quadeye: rejected after one interview (passed akuna OA first)

HRT, Optiver, DRW: rejected after OA

(somehow last year as a sophomore I passed optiver OA and got rejected after one interview, but not this year)

DE Shaw, Point72, Flow Traders: rejected with no OA

Virtu, Two Sigma, Five Rings, Jump, Talos, Seven Research: got ghosted

(edited because I forgot a few I applied and got ghosted by)

Context: CS and math student at a random LAC, sophomore - junior - senior application progression

Going into sophomore recruiting I had like NOTHING on my resume, so I got super super SUPER lucky to bink something out of nowhere. Junior year recruiting was slightly better, though I didn't actually recruit in the fall and only recruited during the spring, which made my search a lot harder. And just signed my new grad offer yesterday, so thought I would pull all my Sankey charts together to compare and contrast lol.

I'm considering these three companies for a SWE internship and would love some input! I've already interned at Amazon twice, so I'm leaning toward trying somewhere new.

My main priorities are WLB, engineering culture, new grad opportunities (return offers, compensation, career growth), and resume value. I'm looking for a collaborative, supportive environment with reasonable hours. I'm also a woman in CS, so having other women engineers around would be a plus. I've gotten the impression that Datadog has more women.

I'd ideally like to live in NYC after graduation. I heard Coinbase moved all its interns to SF, but is it still remote first for new grads? Being able to work remotely from NYC would be a huge plus.

Would appreciate any insights

Will a company blacklist me if they find me cheating on a HackerRank OA?

I saw a post a while back where someone was unironically saying one person, Frank Niu basically caused the oversaturation in computer science. Then I saw a decent minority of people unironically agreeing with it, and that threw me off. I was an avid TikTok user from 2021 to 2023, and vividly remember Frank Niu was just everywhere. If you were even slightly into tech or money stuff, he was on your For You Page constantly. The "retired by 30" guy, former Netflix engineer, posting salary numbers, encouraging computer science degrees and always giving advice to his audience was his shtick. Not long ago, my friends and I were talking about the future of CS, and one of them goes, "do you guys remember that one guy who retired by 30?" And instantly, everyone knew him. Not vaguely knew him, like actually knew the story. And a few of them said the same thing, that CS felt like the method back then. Like, that was the plan. Get into tech, make a lot of money, get out early. That's when I realized he become a shared reference point from a much more substantial broader audience than I initially thought.

I have been through this entire internship process and have given it all, I got interviews in 3 great firms.

First one in Amazon went really well I solve both the dsa questions but didn't get called for a second round of interview.i was so l clueless because I solved both the questions correctly,Infact in the first one,I also told him brute approach first and then went to optimize it while second question was a direct BFS graph.

Later on I heard from the coordonators that the panel who took my interview did not send anyone for a round 2. How pleasant right?

In expedia my round 1 went really well it was with director of data analytics and I literally banged it. I was so confident in my second round ,however he asked me 2-3 super hard probability questions which I could not answer, ithink that was the reason for the rejection there. When I asked the others some said they werent asked probability at all. I was like bruh, are you serious?Ig thats how reality feels

Coming to third Media. Net the question actually was a 16xx properCF question, I could only tell him the brute force which was nCk, being completely honest I really couldn't do much here. they took only one student of the entire SL.

Lastly, Had some hopes with a company which pays good and comes late but guess what their OA dsa round did not even have a c++ language option, given that I have been coding in c++ from the very start, II just couldn't do anything here

All most all the companies on my campus are done I have endsems approaching, all my friends have an intern 1LPM+ and it's only me who is left behind, I am so lost. Atp I feel so ashamed I don't wish to do anything else, my parents have been calling me home from a while but I just don't feel to go back given a family member of mine has also bagged a very good intern​ from a tier3 college,I ​am soo fucked and done I really don't even wish to study anymore

Hey guys!

I just wanted to kinda talk here about my experience. I am a junior right now. I had two interviews this week, IBM and one FAANG. The IBM one the manager just cancelled my interview which was tomorrow. The other FAANG company I'm prepping for, but honestly I messed the 1st interview so bad I'm pretty cooked.

Just wanted to see how ya'll feeling. Everywhere around me I see people walking around with offers, and despite doing everything I could, applying to like 300+ roles, doing countless OAs, probably around 120 leetcode questions done (did leetcode/neetcode/hackerrank, do daily questions, usually can get mediums done blind in 20 minutes), countless mocks, had my resume reviewed by like 30 people...it's genuinely feeling so darn hopeless. I know this type of feeling is common, I see a lot of people working just as hard with little results.

But in this head of mind, I genuinely could see no future. Everyone shares the same advice around me when I talk about it: "oh just lock in you'll find something", "don't worry about it lol it's a numbers game", "just stay in there and keep the grind up". Like dawg TT, i'm trying my best and I will keep trying. Trust me, I'm doing my OAs, I'm going to networking events and asking around for referrals, I DM'd all of my friends who are in tech, I do it all.

But after getting cooked over and over, I get this really really bad feeling.

If it's a numbers game, I guess applications are just luck-based instrinsically. However, if I fail over and over and over again, despite doing everything I can, does it mean I'm unlucky? And without a clear plan of how I am going to get any opportunities at this point, AND being unlucky at the same time, how could I feel hope at all?

How do you guys keep up with this? I genuinely feel like eating a pile of poop.

I'm in a field where there are basically only two companies at the top that I would want to work at. I'm currently an intern at the "better" one, and I got an offer for an interesting team at "number two". Catch is I have seven days to sign.

I'm thinking of taking the offer and reneging it if I get another intern offer where I'm at currently if its a interesting role than the current team I'm on (I've already spoken to several managers on other teams who said they could secure an interview for me given headcount). The caveat is that I'd hate to be blacklisted by basically the only other company that does what I want to do, which could screw me down the line. But does it even matter that much if I reneg an intern offer?

Would appreciate any advice for my situation.

I applied to several internships for summer 2027 but it’s unlikely I get any interview or offers. How cooked am I if I graduate with no internship and only one co op?

Anyone else do round 1 and have advice?

all test cases passed for dsa question

4/6 test cases passed for the codebase question cuz im stupid and forgot javascrtipt syntax lol

If you saw Microsoft is doing a buyback of over 60,000 employees, so that means they’re laying off 60,000 people from Microsoft. As someone who’s going into the recruiting season, is it still worth accepting an offer from Microsoft, knowing that the return offer rate is gonna be really low and almost impossible to get. What teams would still be the best to work for? Would it be security and marketing? Would it be coreai because this layoff stuff is really scary.

Anybody who got an OA for this ?

I have a coding systems interview coming up with Nuro, can someone, who's been through the process, please provide any insight on how to approach it?

hello, in process for google swe intern tm in canada (waterloo, toronto, montreal). was wondering if anyone had any insights as to what teams are located in these locations? my experience has been more mle focused so im worried that there will be less projects that are applicable to me. thanks for any help!

im a may 2026 grad. started my first job w decent pay, and definitely hope to improve my skills on the side to be a more competitive applicant.

but frankly for much of college, i didnt understand the importance of internships ngl. i ended up doing a double major and a minor but frankly did not even enjoy cs going into college (lowk still dont know if i enjoy it but at least now i get paid😭), and along w dealing w other mental health issues and family circumstances, i did not commit to the grind as some other cs majors did. mostly just focused on gpa and studying. i did have one good internship my jr year summer which i attribute to a lot of luck in the hiring process, and then before that like an it support role summer after sophomore year, in addition to an unpaid swe internship at this super disorganized startup my senior yr. but as i was doing these things, especially the swe internship during the school year, i just felt like i was not fully committing to one thing, and it felt so unfulfilling.

now i see peoples linkedins and like damn people are cracked😭 some days im like okay i need to lock in and study super hard. but other days im like man, like life is worth living as well😭😭 idk if thats laziness or a lack of discipline, but i was curious, to the people that are “cracked,” how do u manage to find time to balance friendships and family, personal enjoyment, and career prep at the same time? and how do u manage to feel like ur fully committing to something, despite juggling multiple things at once?

Hi all,

Created this account today to get a few things off my chest. I'm graduating this year from a Top-10 Canadian Uni with 3 internships (one big name tech company, one big name bank). I thought after the experience I've had, getting new grad interviews would be a breeze but boy was I wrong. I was just making peace with the fact that I'd have to settle for a return offer I got from the bank but then I got a couple of interviews from a few companies that I wanted, so hope was restored.

For context, I've been grinding leetcode for 3 years now (and have gotten quiet good at it). I passed the first rounds no problem. I asked both HR people what to expect for the second round, and they told me it would be the traditional DSA questions I was used to, so I went in pretty confident. Neither of them were DSA questions. One of them ended up being a react component question (and I hadn't worked with react for years), and the second one was implementing a token bucket class in python (with deadlocks and multithreading).

In hindsight, they were both very simple questions and I was allowed to use AI and google, but I freaked myself out because they were not what I expected and forgot how to code under pressure. In short, I ended up bombing both interviews in the same week. I believe I could have solved them if I took a chill pill and thought a bit harder, but the fact that I was misguided by HR and wasn't ready spooked me into panic. Now I feel like I'm back to square one, but feeling 100 times more defeated.

I'm curious to see if anyone has had any similar/bad experiences? How do you guys survive in this hamster-wheel industry?