Today I would like to share with you my North American job search experience, from graduating from university to finally getting a job offer. I hope I can give you some help. Although I majored in CS, I am not the kind of “genius” who has been programming since I was a kid. When I first entered the university, I was not interested in programming at all, and I just thought that CS majors in the United States are relatively good at finding a job, so I chose this major. So throughout the university, my programming ability has been stuck in a very basic programming language (Java), and has always been to cope with the level of the examination, do the project, and the real “development engineer” is still far from it.
On the contrary, most of my classmates had solid algorithmic foundation and rich project experience, while I only knew some basic programming knowledge, and I felt that I was far behind them. In order to bridge the gap, I decided to start from scratch, supplement my basic knowledge and try to accumulate project experience.
Although I only know basic programming languages, fortunately I have a good relationship with my professors, so I participated in quite a few school projects, in which I have accumulated to actual programming experience, although it did not involve a very hardcore technology stack. In addition, I also signed up for the LeetCode brushing activity, challenging all kinds of algorithmic problems, although the first brushing is very slow, but slowly, I began to understand the essence of the algorithm.
In order to get closer to “real development”, I started to participate in some open source projects, where I learned a lot of real development skills, how to work in a team, and how to use development tools such as Git. In addition, I got an internship related to my major during the summer. Although it was not a top-tier company, it allowed me to learn about the company's development process and working environment in practice.
The whole process of job searching in North America went relatively smoothly for me, I was lucky to get interviews with Amazon, Meta, and I went through 2 different interview sessions. Since I didn't have a strong project background, the technical interviews at the beginning were very challenging, and many interviewers gave me very difficult algorithmic questions directly. After a few rounds of interviews, I gradually realized my shortcomings, especially in algorithmic questions and system design, which are the standard interview process in big companies, and whether I can skillfully deal with them directly determines whether I can enter the next round.
To this end, I began to carefully prepare for the interview, first of all, it is certainly necessary to brush the questions, my focus is on LeetCode, the process of doing the questions must summarize the rules, the formation of their own ideas to solve the problem, even if you take the template must be able to change. For system design, this part of the content is relatively difficult, especially for people like me who do not have too much work experience. Fortunately, I learned the basics of system design in some online courses, and repeatedly discussed cases with my classmates and tutors to gradually improve my design skills.
I had three rounds of interviews with Meta, two of which were technical interviews and the last round was a behavioral interview. The topics of each round of interviews are not easy, especially in the algorithm part, although many of the topics are difficult, but the good thing is that I know that my algorithm is relatively weak, there are specialized to strengthen the algorithm, so it is quite smooth, there are encountered variants of the problem, so in about three months of the job search and interview process, I finally received Meta's offer. the moment I received the offer, I had very complex feelings, both The moment I received the offer, I had very mixed feelings, both excited and emotional. From the initial confusion to the final offer, the whole process is full of challenges and efforts, and it also makes me realize my own strengths and weaknesses more clearly.
Release time:2025-02-07
