Reddit Experience · Dec 2019

College has not at all prepared me for the workforce.

SWE Onsite New Grad Hard
553 upvotes 236 replies

Interview Experience

I graduate in May. Recently, I have taken 4 onsite interviews at larger companies (Not close to FAANG) and they have all been miserable failures. I have interned with companies for about 2 concurrent

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I graduate in May. Recently, I have taken 4 onsite interviews at larger companies (Not close to FAANG) and they have all been miserable failures. I have interned with companies for about 2 concurrent years as I fortunately attend a city school and can work concurrently to my education. I have gained experience but perhaps not enough. In every onsite interview I have been grilled with technical questions. Questions regarding how I would implement resource and process distribution without kubernetes, explaining exactly what goes on with garbage collection in Python, how I would go about building my own C++ web server for a proprietary operating system, optimizing access to petabytes of SQL DB data, so many hard core questions that I panic and blank on things I have done for work in the past but can't get out in the moment. I have other interviews scheduled and I want to cancel them. I am embarrassed every time I sit in front of them and seemingly waste their time. This goes so far beyond my college classes. I have never been asked anything that I could explain using any of my collegiate eduction. It is all work experience. Perhaps maybe my education was subpar but I am not even in the realm of answering some of the questions I have been asked for entry level jobs. On several occasions I want to just apologize and walk out of the room. If the bar is set this high for entry level knowledge, I don't know where I am supposed to find it or with what time.

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