Significantly

hey, coming on here to share my story as i think it will be helpful for the people here. i worked as an intern during college, however, i ended up not getting the return offer, and was informed of this 90 days before i graduated. i was really stressed out, but i ended up doing well for myself and wanted to share some tips! for context, here are the offers below (startup names not given bc it might give away who i am) startup 1: 135k startup 2: 145k startup 3: 135k meta production engineer new grad: 200k tc (base, stock, bonus, relo, sign on included) <- accepted this one! from my experience, the interviews with startups were SIGNIFICANTLY harder, and were much more difficult to prepare for. i was asked a wide range of questions, from system design to leetcode hards to sql table design. i would say you have to be pretty adept to pass these interviews, though i'm sure many of you here are far more talented than i am in this department. in terms of getting interviews, i mostly cold emailed founders. there's a very specific way to do it, being extremely confident and direct to the point (my subject line was "Why you should hire me over everyone else"). it's a numbers game, although is much more effective than any other method. for my meta interview, it was pretty brutal and extremely in depth on operating systems and networks. the coding rounds weren't terrible, but involved a lot of file manipulation and i was asked to come up with a compression method (topic which i am pretty unfamiliar with) during one. regardless i'm very lucky and happy to say i got through it all! would love to help out others, let me know if there's any specific questions :))