Climbing into FAANG/large tech companies
The title kind of implies that FAANG is at the top and while this is something we can debate, the truth is that they rank companies in different tiers. By “they”, I mostly mean recruiters, managers and hiring committees.
The goal of this post is to give a bit of background on why (I think) big tech companies tend to classify schools/companies for hiring purposes.
- The assumption is that good students go to good schools, and that students from good schools go to good companies – it’s a simple yet effective way to triage candidates. You will have some false negative (i.e. you’ll miss some good candidates) but this is an efficient of doing a bulk triage
- The more interesting reason why big tech companies prefer people with experience in similar companies is that candidates have a more relevant experience – e.g. it’s much more likely that you had experience building services dealing with millions of QPS if you had worked at a large company, similarly, you probably haven’t built a large scale privacy infrastructure if your engineering org is 3 people. That’s why if you have worked at FAANG, you will more or less automatically pass the recruiter step
If you want to join a big tech companies but don’t have the school/big tech credentials, there are a few things that may help:
- Getting an internship at FAANG is significantly easier than getting a job – and once you are in, converting to full time is fairly easy as long as you do well
- Don’t shoot from an unknown small company straight to FAANG – by unknown, I mean for example a company that doesn’t have its levels on levels.fyi. You can join a larger company and more tech oriented as a first step. Note that the company being large isn’t the most important, the company has to be a tech one first
- Last but not least, referrals are the best way to pass the recruiter screen – but this is the case only for genuine referral, i.e. from someone who has worked with you and can talk about your work
Like usual, you also don’t have to join FAANG to be happy, have a high comp or work on interesting things