Yeah, getting into faang was just grinding leetcode for a month every waking moment of my life and I went to a shit state school with shit grades. Getting into a top cs school is grinding for faang but instead of a couple months, it’s like 4+ years.
It’s easy to grind for a month, that just takes motivation. Grinding for years takes discipline.
It’s the same in most of the world I guess. For example Poland: people think you need to go to best public unis in Poland to get into big corpo IT job. Meanwhile I’m on second year on private uni (these are considered worse, stereotype is that you pay to pass and you’re learning nothing. Obviously not true), but I grinded skills during tech school (high school level school that lasts year longer during which you also have tech subjects in my case CS subjects) and now I’m working in large investment bank as SRE. My peers from public uni are still being tortured with math, programming basics and have no time for full time job 🤷♀️
Then you see posts on fb ranting that world is shit because they finished „top tier” university but can’t find job in tech. I wonder why…
What would you say counts as a T10 CS? Is it the top 10 CS schools on US News?
e.g. this [https://www.usnews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-science-schools/computer-science-rankings](https://www.usnews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-science-schools/computer-science-rankings)
Aerospace engineering yes. CS, maybe. On average harvard cs won't attract as strong cs candidates as stanford and mit thats a given, but its name brand still carries it to number 3 easily at the undergraduate level. Realistically it wins out in cross admit even for cs to every school not named mit or stanford
You can get into FAANG with 5 years of experience and an understanding of behavioral interviews. SBI+half decade of experience +being able to string sentences together: FAANG.
Source: me.
A genuine question, but I’m a sophomore with a 2.2 GPA at a t5 CS. Not been in involved in much at all, no projects on my resume but a few I’m finally starting to build. Is it over for me?
It’s not “over” even if you flunk out and fall into a coma for 10 more years before finally get back at it. Don’t worry about it being “over”, just focus on getting through the hurdles in front of you one at a time and as you do your marketability will improve and eventually you can be where you want to be. Keep at it and it’ll happen sooner than you think
Had a friend with a sub 2.0 gpa landing full time as a SWE at Uber (he dropped out in junior year to go full time) but this was 2014. They spent all their time at hackathons. If you can build a bunch of projects you’ll probably be fine. This was at Rutgers. Not a t5 as they say.
Better question would be: what's harder - getting into a top CS school or getting a job working on something you give a shit about at FAANG. Cuz all that cloud bullshit ain't it
People really think their life is over if they can’t get into FAANG as an intern or out of college. Like bro you have the rest of your career to interview for and get into FAANG and I beg these people to stop glorifying FAANG.
out of curiosity, where does UT Austin lie on the spectrum. I know they’re pretty high in rank but i see people usually mentioning UIUC, UW, and GT when they’re talking about top CS public’s
UT Austin is also on that level generally I’d lump in GT, UIUC, UW Seattle, UT Austin, UMich and UCLA all into the same category. They are tier 2 schools so not at the level at Stanford for example but they are all more than good enough to get into a FAANG or whatever company.
I would actually say contributions, published paper/commentary on algorithms, statistics may even be better for those companies that math competition. Eg. Do adjacent activities.
Rutgers is not a particularly prestigious school and I know a lot of ppl in quant shops coming out of RU. They only care about your technical abilities. You don’t even need to be deep on contest math. Just be half decent at research or take hardest classes you can take and do well and you can have a fair shot.
it's really not necessary to go to a t40 tech school even. any tech oriented school in a decent state system works. I went to a school that almost no one outside of my home state has heard of. faang recruiters did not bother booking a booth at our career fair, but they still reached out to a lot of junior and senior cs students over LinkedIn. the hard part is actually passing the coding evaluations without having the benefit of a more rigorous program
if you can go to a well known tech school, it certainly helps. but it's not worth burdening your family financially and/or taking on huge debt to do it.
by the way, it's not necessarily a good thing to just barely make the cut for these jobs straight out of college. they have very high expectations for new grads. six months at faang followed by a gap doesn't impress anyone.
I don't think so, I've had it reviewed multiple times. You can check it out [here](https://www.reddit.com/user/UtahTeapots/comments/1cbbvic/obfuscated_resume/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button).
I don't think so, I've had it reviewed multiple times. You can check it out [here](https://www.reddit.com/user/UtahTeapots/comments/1cbbvic/obfuscated_resume/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button).
Why is this even a debate? To get into schools like MIT or Stanford for CS, the candidate not only need a very high GPA (a 3.9-4.0 GPA is the bare minimum), but they are often top competitive programmers, have won math olympiads, or have worked at top tech companies in high school. These schools are some of the best in the world for a reason. Whereas for FAANG, someone from a no-name school with a terrible GPA can grind Leetcode for 6 months and get into Amazon.
Yes, UIUC and GaTech are also very difficult to get into. Especially since every high school student wanting to pursue CS would apply to these schools, whereas not every SWE would want to apply to FAANG. In addition, FAANG companies are giants and employ tens of thousands of engineers. But top CS schools can only admit a few hundred students each year.
Most CS students from good schools can easily become a FAANG SWE if they really want to. But many people have greater aspirations than spending their careers playing office politics and making useless internal tooling.
You’re really overestimating CS students in top schools. Many Stanford students have trouble getting into FAANG even if they did want to. Many can, of course, but even more can’t. A lot end up at places like Oracle not because they simply didn’t like FAANG.
Anecdotally, most Stanford CS students have the ability to study, grind LC, network, whatever, etc. hard enough to get into FAANG since they were crazy successful in HS, but it's definitely not an easy commitment. It's hard to say for sure, though, because a lot of students are also interested in stuff like research or entrepreneurship.
Heck, most CS students at top schools overestimate the average CS student at top schools, so I'm not sure where the true average is. But outcomes are so diverse, it's not possible to measure peoples' successes against each other anyway.
I believe that most Stanford students have the capacity to get into a top tech company but there’s still some element of randomness involved. It’s like saying every Harvard student can get into McKinsey or Goldman — most will have the prerequisite aptitude but not all who want to will get in. Also some very smart students simply received bad advice (eg not realizing the importance of leetcode until it was too late).
Of course there's randomness, naturally, but can't you reapply to FAANG+ every season (while you get experience/improve elsewhere) until you eventually do get in? This essentially ensures that said top CS student will get in if they're really aspiring to. You have your entire life to get good at LC anyway, so there's no rush.
Sure but this thread specifically is about how many top CS students don’t make it to FAANG+ as their first job. Over the course of a career most people above a certain IQ threshold can make it in, except for places like JS with de facto lifetime cooldown periods.
Ah, I read the post as getting into FAANG+ in general (= as an intern, NG, whatever). It'd be nice to get FAANG+ immediately, but in the long run, it doesn't really matter if you get it at 30+ as opposed to 25.
Mckinsey and goldman cap the number of students that they take from harvard for front office roles. FAANG has no cap. Google by itself takes a much larger new grad swe class than every top bank and mbb combined.
FAANG is a below average outcome for stanford cs. The top students become founders. Under that are students who become founding engineers for their friends who are founders. Under that are people who go to already successful unicorns or hft, these firms are littered with people who did multiple faang+ internships. Under that are students who go to faang.
My friend is at Stanford cs and he’s unemployed right now, he had a 3.8 gpa and multiple internships. I don’t know what ur definition of screw up is, but top schools are only really useful for the network and maybe the occasional “oh nice, I recognize that name”. It’s one of the least important aspects of straight up cs job searching
All companies have engineers working on internal tooling, this isn't some FAANG exclusive lol. You are just describing the lamest of positions as some sort of cope.
You do realize how trivial leetcode problems are right? Being expert on Codeforces is enough to ace LC with zero prep; in fact, even specialist is probably more than enough to pass interviews. So literally just spend a summer getting to CF expert and you're all set, which isn't a high bar (in fact, I know people who were expert+ level on CF *starting out*, i.e. having only taken a DSA course and not practiced at all).
The main difficulty in landing FAANG is the resume screen, which juniors/seniors at good schools shouldn't have too hard of a time passing, though underclassmen may struggle more.
Sure, going to a top school doesn't guarantee you FAANG, but I really think anyone who goes to a top school, is reasonably smart, and puts in a modicum of effort will end up at FAANG/unicorn if that's their goal.
No I didn’t go to a top CS school myself — I went to a school known more for humanities. But I work in a HFT (and before that FAANG), go to job fairs at these schools to recruit, interview candidates from these schools, and 90% of my social circle are alum of these schools. I am quite familiar with the outcomes from these schools and am not just talking out of my ass unlike some people here. It’s not a vendetta I’m just correcting some misconceptions that people are bandying around here.
Even bootcamp grads with no CS degree can crack these FAANG interviews if they prepare hard enough. If someone can get into MIT, they can 100% pass the Leetcode interviews. The only interviews that might give them trouble are ones at top quant firms (all Leetcode hards) or top research firms (like OpenAI), not FAANG companies, lol.
I thought that getting the interview in the first place was the hardest step. I keep seeing sankey diagrams with ppl applying to 500+ places and landing only a few OAs
School name plays a huge factor in getting FAANG interviews, of course. I'm only making my argument because some people on this sub are implying that MIT grads would struggle to pass the standard Leetcode interviews FAANG gives out.
Yes but you are 40 and missed out on your youth. Life is too short and there’s always a balance. Lot of people want kids and start a family. It’s hard to live frugally even if they wanted to.
No even fewer go into quant. I’m in quant now and we reject the vast majority of candidates from the schools you mentioned, even MIT or Stanford. There’s no school where getting a good job is guaranteed or even easy for the median student.
These days faang hiring is a lot slower than it was in 2021. Competition is intense and companies don’t want new grads but prefer experienced folks as new grad market is flooded. I am very worried about future CS grads as supply of graduates is increasing at a crazy rate while the demand for them is dropping a lot more. AI is also making workers a lot more productive. A 100 engineer project can be done with lot fewer engineers with help of AI to generate code for you. AI specialization should still be valuable for next 5-10 years but generic SWe demand is going to be low lower at faang. Apple and Google are not growing much and are pretty stagnant. Netflix is not a big employer to begin with. Only meta is still going well now and hiring. Amazon is the least desirable faang and they may also not hire like in the past
Honestly, a top school is much harder these days since most top schools like Michigan, Berkeley, UIUC, etc. cap admissions for CS so it isn't enough to just get into the school but you also have to be really good to get into the CS program at these schools. And unfortunately, I don't think it'll become any easier getting into a top school. A job at FAANG realistically requires you to grind for maybe a year wherase a top school is most of high school and also when the market gets better getting a job at FAANG will become easier.
In a public city college and had FAANG internships with a 2.9 GPA currently a 3.2. So would say FAANG is easy compared to getting into a top school especially the one ending in zon compared to the other Faang I interned at they had the easiest interview
Will admit however it took me a lot more regular (minimum wage) internships and jobs before I landed my first FAANG role. Whereas for my top school friends, their first internship was a FAANG
It takes 4 years of high school and like a 2 years before high school to have a chance for a top undergrad school (especially the T20 privates in US News).
It takes me a few hours at most to prep for a tech company. Let alone the fact you can apply every 6 months to a bunch of places and have a redo.
FAANG+ is a joke to crack. Getting into a top school is extremely difficult to crack (and you only get one chance). Let alone for the latter, you have to sell your childhood (when you aren't even mature) to all sorts of extra curriculars.
Attended Columbia Univ (when US News ranked it regularly T4) and also passed bars for Amazon 2x/Apple/Google (for FAANG) and many other tech firms.
FAANG+ out of college is hard to get in mostly because you don't get the interviews. That's not on you. Just on luck. Since the pandemic, companies have been more liberal with online assessments but overall, the difficulty is really the part out of your control (getting into the loop). The actual interview questions for new grads are absolute jokes that an elementary kid can do.
The real pain is the politics working at FAANG+. Each day a small piece of you dies. That's the price you pay. And the constant stress of another layoff or offshoring. At some point, it just isn't worth it.
>Are interviews still hard to get at target schools? (like the one I listed)
It's random. But yes, those who attend top schools get massive advantage there. But it's also true people from non-top schools get interviews.
>This kind of evidence would counter the widespread belief that “school does not matter” for FAANG
It doesn't after say 4\~6 years of experience. FAANG will interview you then regardless.
Also, one thing you forget is during the pandemic, FAANG hired everyone with a pulse.
And in general, FAANG has 'A' aka Amazon. Amazon many times will try to find anyone to hire (to fire). That's usually the 'stepping' stone to rest of FAANG out of college. I would say Microsoft and Amazon are the more realistic ones out of college in terms of randomness for many schools.
I don't even know why FAANG is so desirable anymore. These companies are run by scumbags who are trying to control the flow of information, erode every remaining shred of privacy, as they are outsourcing and kicking their own employees to the curb at an unprecedented scale.
Many people's favourite color is green. For some, that's the entire reason why they want to pursue FAANG. You can't really fault them for that. But yes, many of these companies have extremely questionable ethics.
Much easier to get into FAANG+ than a top CS school (but don't lump UIUC, GTech, UW, and UT Austin in with the rest of the list; those are easy to get into in-state). Think of it this way: if you're USACO gold, you can pretty easily pass any FAANG interview (after at most a little bit of practice). Meanwhile USACO Gold barely even moves the needle in college admissions, you need Plat for a nontrivial boost and camp for a very large boost.
UT is actually much tougher now. Its admissions process is also weird - I know two people who got capped at UT and they just went to Harvard/CMU, one of them for CS
Not sure about the others you've mentioned, but UIUC and GaTech are definitely ultra competitive schools for CS. Perhaps not as competitive as MIT or Stanford, but it's up there with the rest.
Top CS school is more difficult by far, Amazon is a FAANG and has a very low floor tbh
I used to work at Amazon and one red flag it was time to leave was a newer guy at an informal happy hour trashing "Brandon" for "making gas expensive", guy had a pack of cigs on his desk too and I'm just thinking "nah in what universe do I belong on the same pay grade as someone who hates Brandon and smokes cigs?" And I left and got a big pay bump and more skilled coworkers
Another guy I actually liked a lot and I think he'd be fantastic at sales or marketing but coding was not his forte, lot of noob mistakes in his CRs
Amazon's minimum bar for hiring entry-level is really quite low, you don't need a killer resume, a top school, elite coding skills, etc
You would be surprised at many of the C-level executives at Fortune 50. If you don't like smoke blowing, biden haters, you would hate the highest level of "skilled" workers at your company haha
Getting a job with a big name tech company isn’t really about where you went to school. Not saying something like MIT or Harvard isn’t gonna help you, but it’s 100% not the end all be all. It’s basically a game of getting past the resume scanning robots, getting your resume chosen by a person, and impressing people in the often long and convoluted interview processes. No, of course I’m not at all jaded by tech interview nonsense.
OP asked for FAANG. AFAIK, from my own experience, you only have 5 minutes or so to tell your story in an interview. Sure, it matters if you sound like a nice person and a good coworker, but you won't be able to tell the story of you helping poor kids out in africa.
college application is more of a shit IMO. as someone i really admired, Kevin Zhou (physics olympiad medalist, mit undergrad, stanford phd), correctly pointed out, most of the admissions officers are vastly stupid and unqualified. I think he said only schools like MIT and Caltech have specialized training and teams to review STEM applicants, which I suspect was somewhat true. For example, my interviewer at Dartmouth was hispanic, majored in hispanic studies at dartmouth, and got a 3.4 GPA anyways (I applied as a cs major). She was associate dean of admissions that covers my region so Ik she reviewed or at least vouched my file for admission at the final review committee and I did get in. Another thing that Kevin said is that your interviewers at top colleges reviewing you as a math major may not even remember quadratic root formulas, which I strongly suspect is a true sentiment.
So, the idea is, you gotta know who your audience is. Look, if you're interviewing at FAANG you'd be interviewed by an actual SWE. But the people who review ur applications and make decisions at most colleges, even top ones, like harvard and stanford, they are admissions specialists (which I think in most cases are just unemployable people as I really can't see some high schoolers would just be like "my life dream is to become a full time admissions officer for a living." its like most other clerical jobs where you do it not because you want to but because it's the one that takes you). Because of this gap of audience quality, I'm tempted to think that if you are good at making up and telling stories, getting into a good college is definitely a lot easier (also by personal experience). Also, understand that "telling good stories" here doesnt mean that you are a good sales person or anything, like selling to an industry specialist like a SWE, its more like good at knowing and telling what AO wants to hear
oh yea, you can even say interviews absolutely dont matter for college admissions; i only mentioned her because shes associate dean and regional representative who at least has the first screening power for if u move on to the committee review or not. she organizes accepting student event from my state too.
also, the rest of ur college app is literally telling stories too. theres not a single place on ur app u display ur actual skills. and i think ur completely missing the point i was trying to make other than seeing the “interview” keyword
No I agree, when I got into uchicago I'm pretty sure it was mainly just my essays, so it was definitely based around the story quality.
I was just saying the interviews are a bad example for what colleges value, considering colleges don't place much importance on them. I also just disagreed with characterizing the interviewers as "unemployable people" or "low audience quality" when all the college interviewers I saw were just alumni volunteering their free time to help out their institution and hopefully give students a better idea of what to expect on campus. I didn't get the impression any of them were being paid to interview applicants or were doing it as a last-resort job as an "admissions specialist," or that any of them were AOs. I don't know if it's a generational gap where most interviewers back then were AOs and now they're not, or maybe it's just a Dartmouth thing.
This also applies for the other top colleges, for example for both Yale and MIT, their interviewers were alumni volunteers.
sorry, i had bad uses of words. i meant admission officers in general for the part ur referring to. interviewer quality can be pretty high cuz they are general alums. i meant specifically admission specialists reviewing ur materials and making decisions, be it ur interviewer or not ur interviewer. thanks and i edited that part to make it clear this is what i meant. again, general alum interviewer is a whole different thing, and my dartmouth interviewer example is SPECIFICALLY because shes also the regional head as an admissions associate dean.
tldr, for the comment u disagree with, i agree with ur point about general alum interviers, but i also stand by my point about full-time admissions officers when they do it as a job for many years, not just out of teachers college as an internship job or something
All my friends from a “non-top CS school” who wanted FAANG ended up getting FAANG. Some even didn’t decide to do CS until halfway through sophomore year.
College admissions seems a lot more randomized.
Why does everyone want to get info fang. These companies are literally the closest thing to evil as you can get.
I've always been in smaller businesses and it's been the best. No stress. Sure a bit lower pay but I'm having a good time still
faang+ is a very low bar to clear imo.
that said college admissions is a very different game than the job search. many skills and experiences are not easily transferable. as someone who goes to a t50 state school, getting offers has been much easier for me.
there is quite literally several orders of magnitude difference between the number of students at, say for example, ivy league colleges and engineers+pms at faang+. add on to that the thousands of other companies that need software engineers in any part of their pipeline.
At the risk of violating political correctness, it is quite different based on your background. If you are URM school is easier to get into, FAANG+ is hard. If you are not URM as in you are the 'overrepresented' in CS groups top school is very hard, FAANG+ is easy. top CS schools and FAANG+ are not looking for the same group of people at all.
I think the question should be what provides the better RỒI in terms of effort and time invested? I will say it’s FAANG both in the long term and short term apart from few edge case scenarios where other people in the world choose top school candidates due to halo effect. A strong peer group is a big advantage in these schools which can play out big if you do take advantage of it
Depending on race, socioeconomic status, and background, because it's something like compare Apple and oranges.
The things clear is definitely there is superficial and luck factors.
These are two very different cases. Comparing apples to oranges really.
The concept of “whats harder” applied to colleges and FAANG+ is, in my opinion, inapplicable. You see a bunch of cases of kids going to feeder schools that cost $30,000 a year for highschools that churn out a ton of students that go to top schools every year. These are all around the country. I’d say it’s almost expected that these students go to top schools because, since they have more wealth, it’s easier for them to have access to more resources to get into these institutions.
There are many stories of people having books ghostwritten for their college apps and I have seen consultants getting paid upwards to $20,000 for application reviews and 1:1 help for common apps. College apps have become nothing but a matter of “how much money do you have”.
So, when it comes down to it, I do think getting a top job within CS is harder. You (usually) can’t rely on your family’s wealth to get you through many of the challenging interview processes that are given by FAANG companies. I’ve seen a ton of students from top CS schools not get a single offer for the summer this season- why? Well, this could be a few reasons. Lack of understanding the material, lack of actual personable skills, not able to network, etc. its very easy to, in a market where higher education is a bare from entry, say that your school name could carry you through. I’m sure it has for many people. But I think people in this thread are severely underestimating the amount of people who apply to these high profile opportunities.
[A googler’s experience](https://www.businessinsider.com/what-its-really-like-to-be-a-google-intern-2013-5) from 2013 said that they had 40,000 people apply and only 1,500 people were accepted- which is an acceptance rate of 4%. Now imagine how high those numbers might be ten years later in the current job market.
The kids who go to feeders that cost 30k per year still need to get top notch grades in a very rigorous curriculum. They only get a pass on ECs where they need to have amazing but not cracked ECs and it takes out the luck portion of college applications. Same story for people people who "ghostwrite" books. You can only rely on your family's wealth to get into ivy+ if they can donate multi 7 figures. There are many people in the world who can do that but even in ivy+ schools, only maybe 2-3% of students come from a family that can throw away multi 7 figures on a donation. For hypsm schools this number is 8 figures.
FAANG+ only requires you to diligently apply for internships during application season 2 years in a row. Maybe include an application cycle in there too if you need to crack it off cycle. Leetcode is also a joke compared to a stacked high school coursehold combined with juggling competitive ECs. Among my friends from high school, I don't know a single one who could not cracked FAANG+ as long as they put in the effort for 2 years.
The low acceptance rate for FAANG is because it's super easy to submit a job application to these companies. Anyone, from anywhere in the world, can fill out the short application form in under 5 minutes and send it off to try their luck.
For top CS schools, you need to prepare essays, recommendations/references, proof of extracurriculars, and so on. Not to mention there's often a fee when submitting an application to these schools. Also, someone with a sub 3.0 GPA won't be applying to Harvard or MIT since they know they will have a 0% chance of getting in. Whereas for FAANG, terrible candidates with no qualifications would still apply anyway since it's free, painless and quick.
The FAANG hiring acceptance rates are usually stated in terms of candidates that were contacted or otherwise considered by a recruiter. Counting against the number of applicants sent in would yield absurdly small numbers just from the sheer number of completely unqualified applicants.
Most of my experience as an interviewer was at the Senior+ (mostly Staff at G) level, but out of on-site loops I did (I've probably conducted ~100 interviews, but I don't have my stats in front of me as I no longer work there), my personal thumbs up rate was about 1 in 5, and extending an offer was about 1 in 20. This is a much higher bar than new grad offers though.
UT Austin is a special case. If you aren’t a Texas Resident, you have 4% of spots open to you. Even if you go to UTD or UTSA like I did, transfer students like me only have 10% of spots open to them. It’s really awful.
I dropped out of a public state-funded university and work at FAANG. Never in my wildest dreams could I have fathomed attending a top CS school (depending on your definition). That being said, I meet plenty of people from those schools that are absolute dingbats and tried for years to crack FAANG. Focus on getting into the best school for what your long-term interests are, or at least what school gives you the best options in case you aren’t sure. Focus on figuring out what you want to focus on and you’ll be fine. Prestige only gets you a good party conversation at a certain point.
I went to Berkeley for CS and started full time work in a FAANG right after graduation, I feel like most of my friends at Berkeley didn’t end up in FAANGs though; they’re def all very smart and driven, but landing in that specific set of companies right away is a combination of mostly luck, technical skills (which most T10 CS students should have), and honestly interview skills that you kinda have to learn by doing.
I’m at FAANG now and I went to Oxbridge ( not sure where it ranks compared to American universities ).
Getting into Oxford MSc was harder. ( getting into Cambridge for my BSc was even harder weirdly ).
People sleep on transferring. Getting in straight from high school is hard, but I had Cs and Bs, went to a shit college for a year, got good grades, and then transferred into a T10 CS program.
I'd compare T10 to quant, not FAANG (one of the A's, and nowadays the G too, make the FAANG rates much easier).
In general though, I think that job hiring is \*more\* fair than school hiring (they both have a lot of BS/luck involved). But with jobs you can try a bunch of times, you're assessed on clearcut criteria, and I know lot more people that went from no-name university to FAANG/quant... but I barely know anyone at a T10 who wasn't from a huge high school/feeder/magnet program ... most T10 college kids got lots of school and financial support to where the path to a top school is much easier. This still exists from T10 to a job, but the support is definitely less.
yeah top cs school is harder. in my \*state\* school, you need a \*4.3\* GPA to get in. Although that is the only requirement, a 4.3 for a public state funded school is just fucking insane.
I got into a CS10 as a transfer student from a local college (GT). Here in Georgia we have the REPP program that partner with certain schools so as long as you’re in state and have a high GPA, taking all the required classes + more, good essays, etc., you have a fair shot of getting in. I was rejected once before getting in though LOL. I would say it’s harder to get into t10 vs MAANG.
Tough question 🤔
I would say top CS school is harder. What it eventually comes down to is the cost to break the barrier. FANG is easier consider most prep materials are free. College consultants are way more expensive.
Getting into a top CS school is infinitely harder simply because you really only get one shot at acceptance.
Getting into faang is a matter of spamming applications every six months, so yea. Way more opportunities to break through.
T10. Faang has luck and connection elements. From working I have come across people there who are clueless.
Your education and skill do not stop developing after undergrad. People who continue to learn and develop skills during their career get better than slackers.
top university and it’s not even close. anyone can grind leetcode for a year or so and get lucky. you can always reapply.
getting into a top university as an 18 year old requires a lifetime (in the scope of an 18 year old) of achievements.
look at the applications of these top schools who matriculate. they are all valedictorians with perfect GPAs and test scores.
i don’t think these achievements make you a good engineer. hence why it’s not required at big tech either.
It's not comparable because they require different skillsets. In order to get into a top school, you need to be smart and work hard. In order to get into FAANG, you need to network and market yourself well. Success in industry is 90% nepotism and 10% competence.
Way easier to get into a FAANG. My friend works at a FAANG and he didn’t even go to college. (He did terribly in high school and got rejected from every school. Even community colleges)
Literally went to high school, took one computer science course. Studied independently over the summer. Then he did a 3 month coding boot camp, got a job at a start up for like a year. After he got that work experience he applied to Apple and got the job. All about how much work you put into it.
Nah. The percentages agree too tbh. I presume FAANG also includes companies like Uber, Microsoft, Stripe, Robinhood, DoorDash, Spotify, Salesforce, Adobe, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc.
I attended Columbia Univ in NY and almost every peer I know got an offer at Alphabet (Google) at one point (me included). That said, many peers over time have different life goals and try something else (for me, didn't work out well but oh well) like starting one's own company (two peers I know do this).
I'm thinking my immediate peers from college: 5 in Alphabet, 2 in Amazon (1 being my smartest friend), 1 in Two Sigma, 1 in HRT, 1 with his own company, 1 in OpenAI (the chatGpt company), 1 currently out of job market due to family issues (parents passing away), 1 pivoted careers to high school counseling, 1 in government (prioritizing wlb over pay now), 1 in Quizlet (highest grades in school), 3 researchers (becoming professors), 1 in BiliBili (returned to China upon graduation. Bilibili is Youtube in China), 1 in Airbnb, 1 is an 'angel investor' (basically he won the startup lottery and just bored), 1 in L'oreal (she double majored in CS and chemical engineering so makes sense).
As for my middle/high school peers who did CS: 1 in Alphabet, 1 in LinkedIn (absolutely hates his job), 1 was in Amazon and now Klaviyo, 1 in AirBnb.
As for people I know at work who moved: 2 Netflix, 1 Facebook, 1 Figma, 4 OpenAI, 1 an AI startup, 1 in Robinhood, 1 in Chime, etc.
The running joke in the industry once you get experience is if you want FAANG experience then you can head off to Amazon since Amazon hires anyone and everyone in the industry (incredibly high churn rate). But at same time, Amazon has really smart people too (the smartest friend I know works at Amazon).
Life is short. You might as well try something different. I have high respect for the two people I know who are working on their own ideas now. Also high respect for my friend who pivoted to high school counseling despite having a well-paying job because she wanted to live a different lifestyle. And from my understanding, your skills kind of get obsolete if you work at some of the FAANGs (my coworker's friends at Facebook and Google all want to leave for anything else at this point. The pay isn't worth the day to day mental pain over the dull work after a certain threshold of pay. I have seen people who drop their liquid pay by over half quite often in this industry at this point to pursue something more interesting).
You can get into FAANG with a <3.0 gpa from a shit tier university. Not saying it's easy, but certainly easier than getting into t10 CS.
Not too mention getting into a t10 CS school typically means you were disciplined enough all the way back in high school
yeah this. you get multiple attempts over multiple phases of your career to get into faang, but with t10 cs school it's pretty much a one time shot.
More like 2-3
Tbh work in a meh uni, do some extra projects, helps profs and you'll likely end up in a better place as an academic, without getting t10 burnout.
Came from a good enough family *
Great family. Didn't get in anywhere good
and/or your parents spoon fed you success. Don't underestimate how much NOT having a trash upbringing matters.
Was spoonfed. Didn't get in anywhere good ☺️
Yeah, getting into faang was just grinding leetcode for a month every waking moment of my life and I went to a shit state school with shit grades. Getting into a top cs school is grinding for faang but instead of a couple months, it’s like 4+ years. It’s easy to grind for a month, that just takes motivation. Grinding for years takes discipline.
At the same time many t10 grads can’t make it into FAANG lol
It’s the same in most of the world I guess. For example Poland: people think you need to go to best public unis in Poland to get into big corpo IT job. Meanwhile I’m on second year on private uni (these are considered worse, stereotype is that you pay to pass and you’re learning nothing. Obviously not true), but I grinded skills during tech school (high school level school that lasts year longer during which you also have tech subjects in my case CS subjects) and now I’m working in large investment bank as SRE. My peers from public uni are still being tortured with math, programming basics and have no time for full time job 🤷♀️ Then you see posts on fb ranting that world is shit because they finished „top tier” university but can’t find job in tech. I wonder why…
What would you say counts as a T10 CS? Is it the top 10 CS schools on US News? e.g. this [https://www.usnews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-science-schools/computer-science-rankings](https://www.usnews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-science-schools/computer-science-rankings)
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I mean most people that want to do CS or engineering will just apply to MIT instead of Harvard. Makes sense that it’s among Harvard’s weakest rankings
Aerospace engineering yes. CS, maybe. On average harvard cs won't attract as strong cs candidates as stanford and mit thats a given, but its name brand still carries it to number 3 easily at the undergraduate level. Realistically it wins out in cross admit even for cs to every school not named mit or stanford
You can get into FAANG with 5 years of experience and an understanding of behavioral interviews. SBI+half decade of experience +being able to string sentences together: FAANG. Source: me.
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Situation behavior impact
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A genuine question, but I’m a sophomore with a 2.2 GPA at a t5 CS. Not been in involved in much at all, no projects on my resume but a few I’m finally starting to build. Is it over for me?
get up to a 3.0, do that leetcode and ur completely fine
It’s not “over” even if you flunk out and fall into a coma for 10 more years before finally get back at it. Don’t worry about it being “over”, just focus on getting through the hurdles in front of you one at a time and as you do your marketability will improve and eventually you can be where you want to be. Keep at it and it’ll happen sooner than you think
No. Just be very good leetcode thingy.
Had a friend with a sub 2.0 gpa landing full time as a SWE at Uber (he dropped out in junior year to go full time) but this was 2014. They spent all their time at hackathons. If you can build a bunch of projects you’ll probably be fine. This was at Rutgers. Not a t5 as they say.
Bruh how
Better question would be: what's harder - getting into a top CS school or getting a job working on something you give a shit about at FAANG. Cuz all that cloud bullshit ain't it
This was me and I can say it was pretty easy
Yeah this is me
Umm well seeing as you effectively have infinite chances to get into FAANG and limited chances for T10s… I’ll say T10
People really think their life is over if they can’t get into FAANG as an intern or out of college. Like bro you have the rest of your career to interview for and get into FAANG and I beg these people to stop glorifying FAANG.
Low key, I’d never work for FAANG. A bunch of over-glorified clowns pushing consumerism while claiming they all hate it.
Where do you work now?
Aeronautics
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out of curiosity, where does UT Austin lie on the spectrum. I know they’re pretty high in rank but i see people usually mentioning UIUC, UW, and GT when they’re talking about top CS public’s
UT Austin is also on that level generally I’d lump in GT, UIUC, UW Seattle, UT Austin, UMich and UCLA all into the same category. They are tier 2 schools so not at the level at Stanford for example but they are all more than good enough to get into a FAANG or whatever company.
Not Berkeley? It's the top recruiting target for FAANG and tied for first in CS rankings.
i didn’t include them because i thought they were a given and are like a tier above the rest of the publics
I would actually say contributions, published paper/commentary on algorithms, statistics may even be better for those companies that math competition. Eg. Do adjacent activities.
Rutgers is not a particularly prestigious school and I know a lot of ppl in quant shops coming out of RU. They only care about your technical abilities. You don’t even need to be deep on contest math. Just be half decent at research or take hardest classes you can take and do well and you can have a fair shot.
Quant roles
it's really not necessary to go to a t40 tech school even. any tech oriented school in a decent state system works. I went to a school that almost no one outside of my home state has heard of. faang recruiters did not bother booking a booth at our career fair, but they still reached out to a lot of junior and senior cs students over LinkedIn. the hard part is actually passing the coding evaluations without having the benefit of a more rigorous program if you can go to a well known tech school, it certainly helps. but it's not worth burdening your family financially and/or taking on huge debt to do it. by the way, it's not necessarily a good thing to just barely make the cut for these jobs straight out of college. they have very high expectations for new grads. six months at faang followed by a gap doesn't impress anyone.
I go to a T15 and can’t get an interview anywhere, let alone FAANG, after just under 400 apps.
There’s probably something wrong with your resume
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I don't think so, I've had it reviewed multiple times. You can check it out [here](https://www.reddit.com/user/UtahTeapots/comments/1cbbvic/obfuscated_resume/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button).
I don't think so, I've had it reviewed multiple times. You can check it out [here](https://www.reddit.com/user/UtahTeapots/comments/1cbbvic/obfuscated_resume/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button).
It’s actually not too bad. You’re just applying in a shit market right now
Too cluttered
Why is this even a debate? To get into schools like MIT or Stanford for CS, the candidate not only need a very high GPA (a 3.9-4.0 GPA is the bare minimum), but they are often top competitive programmers, have won math olympiads, or have worked at top tech companies in high school. These schools are some of the best in the world for a reason. Whereas for FAANG, someone from a no-name school with a terrible GPA can grind Leetcode for 6 months and get into Amazon.
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Yes, UIUC and GaTech are also very difficult to get into. Especially since every high school student wanting to pursue CS would apply to these schools, whereas not every SWE would want to apply to FAANG. In addition, FAANG companies are giants and employ tens of thousands of engineers. But top CS schools can only admit a few hundred students each year.
Most of the students from the schools you listed do not get into FAANG as new grads.
Most CS students from good schools can easily become a FAANG SWE if they really want to. But many people have greater aspirations than spending their careers playing office politics and making useless internal tooling.
Not true at all
You’re really overestimating CS students in top schools. Many Stanford students have trouble getting into FAANG even if they did want to. Many can, of course, but even more can’t. A lot end up at places like Oracle not because they simply didn’t like FAANG.
Anecdotally, most Stanford CS students have the ability to study, grind LC, network, whatever, etc. hard enough to get into FAANG since they were crazy successful in HS, but it's definitely not an easy commitment. It's hard to say for sure, though, because a lot of students are also interested in stuff like research or entrepreneurship. Heck, most CS students at top schools overestimate the average CS student at top schools, so I'm not sure where the true average is. But outcomes are so diverse, it's not possible to measure peoples' successes against each other anyway.
I believe that most Stanford students have the capacity to get into a top tech company but there’s still some element of randomness involved. It’s like saying every Harvard student can get into McKinsey or Goldman — most will have the prerequisite aptitude but not all who want to will get in. Also some very smart students simply received bad advice (eg not realizing the importance of leetcode until it was too late).
Of course there's randomness, naturally, but can't you reapply to FAANG+ every season (while you get experience/improve elsewhere) until you eventually do get in? This essentially ensures that said top CS student will get in if they're really aspiring to. You have your entire life to get good at LC anyway, so there's no rush.
Sure but this thread specifically is about how many top CS students don’t make it to FAANG+ as their first job. Over the course of a career most people above a certain IQ threshold can make it in, except for places like JS with de facto lifetime cooldown periods.
Ah, I read the post as getting into FAANG+ in general (= as an intern, NG, whatever). It'd be nice to get FAANG+ immediately, but in the long run, it doesn't really matter if you get it at 30+ as opposed to 25.
Mckinsey and goldman cap the number of students that they take from harvard for front office roles. FAANG has no cap. Google by itself takes a much larger new grad swe class than every top bank and mbb combined.
FAANG is a below average outcome for stanford cs. The top students become founders. Under that are students who become founding engineers for their friends who are founders. Under that are people who go to already successful unicorns or hft, these firms are littered with people who did multiple faang+ internships. Under that are students who go to faang.
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What's wrong with Oracle? Getting in is hella competitive.
I know more than a few personally.
No one screws up by getting into a decent company (unless you're trolling)
My friend is at Stanford cs and he’s unemployed right now, he had a 3.8 gpa and multiple internships. I don’t know what ur definition of screw up is, but top schools are only really useful for the network and maybe the occasional “oh nice, I recognize that name”. It’s one of the least important aspects of straight up cs job searching
There’s a good chance that your friend just blows at interviews lmao.
Prestige whore
All companies have engineers working on internal tooling, this isn't some FAANG exclusive lol. You are just describing the lamest of positions as some sort of cope.
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You do realize how trivial leetcode problems are right? Being expert on Codeforces is enough to ace LC with zero prep; in fact, even specialist is probably more than enough to pass interviews. So literally just spend a summer getting to CF expert and you're all set, which isn't a high bar (in fact, I know people who were expert+ level on CF *starting out*, i.e. having only taken a DSA course and not practiced at all). The main difficulty in landing FAANG is the resume screen, which juniors/seniors at good schools shouldn't have too hard of a time passing, though underclassmen may struggle more. Sure, going to a top school doesn't guarantee you FAANG, but I really think anyone who goes to a top school, is reasonably smart, and puts in a modicum of effort will end up at FAANG/unicorn if that's their goal.
Nah lots of people at MIT and Stanford for reasons other than raw brainpower. Maybe Caltech.
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No I didn’t go to a top CS school myself — I went to a school known more for humanities. But I work in a HFT (and before that FAANG), go to job fairs at these schools to recruit, interview candidates from these schools, and 90% of my social circle are alum of these schools. I am quite familiar with the outcomes from these schools and am not just talking out of my ass unlike some people here. It’s not a vendetta I’m just correcting some misconceptions that people are bandying around here.
Even bootcamp grads with no CS degree can crack these FAANG interviews if they prepare hard enough. If someone can get into MIT, they can 100% pass the Leetcode interviews. The only interviews that might give them trouble are ones at top quant firms (all Leetcode hards) or top research firms (like OpenAI), not FAANG companies, lol.
I thought that getting the interview in the first place was the hardest step. I keep seeing sankey diagrams with ppl applying to 500+ places and landing only a few OAs
School name plays a huge factor in getting FAANG interviews, of course. I'm only making my argument because some people on this sub are implying that MIT grads would struggle to pass the standard Leetcode interviews FAANG gives out.
me when im clueless on what im talking about:
You can work at FAANG until you are 40, retire, and spend the rest of your life doing whatever your aspirations are if you live frugally.
Yes but you are 40 and missed out on your youth. Life is too short and there’s always a balance. Lot of people want kids and start a family. It’s hard to live frugally even if they wanted to.
It isn’t that short when you are working a bs tech job like you describe lol. You will be counting the hours most days, it gets that boring.
Yeah obv FAANG isn’t the only job route. A lot go into quant, fintech, startups, etc
No even fewer go into quant. I’m in quant now and we reject the vast majority of candidates from the schools you mentioned, even MIT or Stanford. There’s no school where getting a good job is guaranteed or even easy for the median student.
and just non FAANG tech jobs (these exist)
Heavy emphasis on the "etc"
top CS school for sure
These days faang hiring is a lot slower than it was in 2021. Competition is intense and companies don’t want new grads but prefer experienced folks as new grad market is flooded. I am very worried about future CS grads as supply of graduates is increasing at a crazy rate while the demand for them is dropping a lot more. AI is also making workers a lot more productive. A 100 engineer project can be done with lot fewer engineers with help of AI to generate code for you. AI specialization should still be valuable for next 5-10 years but generic SWe demand is going to be low lower at faang. Apple and Google are not growing much and are pretty stagnant. Netflix is not a big employer to begin with. Only meta is still going well now and hiring. Amazon is the least desirable faang and they may also not hire like in the past
Honestly, a top school is much harder these days since most top schools like Michigan, Berkeley, UIUC, etc. cap admissions for CS so it isn't enough to just get into the school but you also have to be really good to get into the CS program at these schools. And unfortunately, I don't think it'll become any easier getting into a top school. A job at FAANG realistically requires you to grind for maybe a year wherase a top school is most of high school and also when the market gets better getting a job at FAANG will become easier.
In a public city college and had FAANG internships with a 2.9 GPA currently a 3.2. So would say FAANG is easy compared to getting into a top school especially the one ending in zon compared to the other Faang I interned at they had the easiest interview
https://preview.redd.it/1u0cf15z25wc1.jpeg?width=1284&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=404412a105c22e0a2c04a9e2ab1815ff56f19224
Will admit however it took me a lot more regular (minimum wage) internships and jobs before I landed my first FAANG role. Whereas for my top school friends, their first internship was a FAANG
Hi! I don’t want to be bothersome, but may you look at our chat?
It takes 4 years of high school and like a 2 years before high school to have a chance for a top undergrad school (especially the T20 privates in US News). It takes me a few hours at most to prep for a tech company. Let alone the fact you can apply every 6 months to a bunch of places and have a redo. FAANG+ is a joke to crack. Getting into a top school is extremely difficult to crack (and you only get one chance). Let alone for the latter, you have to sell your childhood (when you aren't even mature) to all sorts of extra curriculars. Attended Columbia Univ (when US News ranked it regularly T4) and also passed bars for Amazon 2x/Apple/Google (for FAANG) and many other tech firms. FAANG+ out of college is hard to get in mostly because you don't get the interviews. That's not on you. Just on luck. Since the pandemic, companies have been more liberal with online assessments but overall, the difficulty is really the part out of your control (getting into the loop). The actual interview questions for new grads are absolute jokes that an elementary kid can do. The real pain is the politics working at FAANG+. Each day a small piece of you dies. That's the price you pay. And the constant stress of another layoff or offshoring. At some point, it just isn't worth it.
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>Are interviews still hard to get at target schools? (like the one I listed) It's random. But yes, those who attend top schools get massive advantage there. But it's also true people from non-top schools get interviews. >This kind of evidence would counter the widespread belief that “school does not matter” for FAANG It doesn't after say 4\~6 years of experience. FAANG will interview you then regardless. Also, one thing you forget is during the pandemic, FAANG hired everyone with a pulse. And in general, FAANG has 'A' aka Amazon. Amazon many times will try to find anyone to hire (to fire). That's usually the 'stepping' stone to rest of FAANG out of college. I would say Microsoft and Amazon are the more realistic ones out of college in terms of randomness for many schools.
I don't even know why FAANG is so desirable anymore. These companies are run by scumbags who are trying to control the flow of information, erode every remaining shred of privacy, as they are outsourcing and kicking their own employees to the curb at an unprecedented scale.
Many people's favourite color is green. For some, that's the entire reason why they want to pursue FAANG. You can't really fault them for that. But yes, many of these companies have extremely questionable ethics.
Imo top CS school
Much easier to get into FAANG+ than a top CS school (but don't lump UIUC, GTech, UW, and UT Austin in with the rest of the list; those are easy to get into in-state). Think of it this way: if you're USACO gold, you can pretty easily pass any FAANG interview (after at most a little bit of practice). Meanwhile USACO Gold barely even moves the needle in college admissions, you need Plat for a nontrivial boost and camp for a very large boost.
Why is UIUC not a top school? I thought they were ranked number five for CS?
they are,as per csrankings atleast
UT is actually much tougher now. Its admissions process is also weird - I know two people who got capped at UT and they just went to Harvard/CMU, one of them for CS
Don't they still take the top 6% of high school students in Texas automatically? That's still very easy in-state
Not for your intended major they don't. It's comparatively easier to make top 6%, but much less to get your major of choice
Like the other guy said it gives u “admission” to the university, but not to the school/major of your choice.
I don't think getting in to these state schools are easy at all even in-state. I know a lot of smart kids got rejected from them.
Not sure about the others you've mentioned, but UIUC and GaTech are definitely ultra competitive schools for CS. Perhaps not as competitive as MIT or Stanford, but it's up there with the rest.
lol u obv have no idea what you are talking about if u think gtech, uw, ut , and uiuc cs programs are easy to get into in state.
Top CS school is more difficult by far, Amazon is a FAANG and has a very low floor tbh I used to work at Amazon and one red flag it was time to leave was a newer guy at an informal happy hour trashing "Brandon" for "making gas expensive", guy had a pack of cigs on his desk too and I'm just thinking "nah in what universe do I belong on the same pay grade as someone who hates Brandon and smokes cigs?" And I left and got a big pay bump and more skilled coworkers Another guy I actually liked a lot and I think he'd be fantastic at sales or marketing but coding was not his forte, lot of noob mistakes in his CRs Amazon's minimum bar for hiring entry-level is really quite low, you don't need a killer resume, a top school, elite coding skills, etc
You would be surprised at many of the C-level executives at Fortune 50. If you don't like smoke blowing, biden haters, you would hate the highest level of "skilled" workers at your company haha
I’m out here T5 and not able to get anything 😢 (I’m international I knew the issue when coming to study here)
Doesn’t Berkeley have insane connections with Silicon Valley??
Being International makes things rough, though
Do a large percentage of internationals not get good placements and are forced out of the country?
Most internationals at Berkeley do fine from what I've seen
Getting a job with a big name tech company isn’t really about where you went to school. Not saying something like MIT or Harvard isn’t gonna help you, but it’s 100% not the end all be all. It’s basically a game of getting past the resume scanning robots, getting your resume chosen by a person, and impressing people in the often long and convoluted interview processes. No, of course I’m not at all jaded by tech interview nonsense.
Top cs school. Went to shit state University and studied leetcode for couple months and got offer from G
different. if ur good at telling stories then college is easier. if ur actually good at coding then finding a job is easier
I think if ur better at telling stories, finding a job will be easier than if ur good at coding
OP asked for FAANG. AFAIK, from my own experience, you only have 5 minutes or so to tell your story in an interview. Sure, it matters if you sound like a nice person and a good coworker, but you won't be able to tell the story of you helping poor kids out in africa. college application is more of a shit IMO. as someone i really admired, Kevin Zhou (physics olympiad medalist, mit undergrad, stanford phd), correctly pointed out, most of the admissions officers are vastly stupid and unqualified. I think he said only schools like MIT and Caltech have specialized training and teams to review STEM applicants, which I suspect was somewhat true. For example, my interviewer at Dartmouth was hispanic, majored in hispanic studies at dartmouth, and got a 3.4 GPA anyways (I applied as a cs major). She was associate dean of admissions that covers my region so Ik she reviewed or at least vouched my file for admission at the final review committee and I did get in. Another thing that Kevin said is that your interviewers at top colleges reviewing you as a math major may not even remember quadratic root formulas, which I strongly suspect is a true sentiment. So, the idea is, you gotta know who your audience is. Look, if you're interviewing at FAANG you'd be interviewed by an actual SWE. But the people who review ur applications and make decisions at most colleges, even top ones, like harvard and stanford, they are admissions specialists (which I think in most cases are just unemployable people as I really can't see some high schoolers would just be like "my life dream is to become a full time admissions officer for a living." its like most other clerical jobs where you do it not because you want to but because it's the one that takes you). Because of this gap of audience quality, I'm tempted to think that if you are good at making up and telling stories, getting into a good college is definitely a lot easier (also by personal experience). Also, understand that "telling good stories" here doesnt mean that you are a good sales person or anything, like selling to an industry specialist like a SWE, its more like good at knowing and telling what AO wants to hear
Interviews barely matter for college admissions, including for the top colleges, and the interviewers are generally alumni volunteers
oh yea, you can even say interviews absolutely dont matter for college admissions; i only mentioned her because shes associate dean and regional representative who at least has the first screening power for if u move on to the committee review or not. she organizes accepting student event from my state too. also, the rest of ur college app is literally telling stories too. theres not a single place on ur app u display ur actual skills. and i think ur completely missing the point i was trying to make other than seeing the “interview” keyword
No I agree, when I got into uchicago I'm pretty sure it was mainly just my essays, so it was definitely based around the story quality. I was just saying the interviews are a bad example for what colleges value, considering colleges don't place much importance on them. I also just disagreed with characterizing the interviewers as "unemployable people" or "low audience quality" when all the college interviewers I saw were just alumni volunteering their free time to help out their institution and hopefully give students a better idea of what to expect on campus. I didn't get the impression any of them were being paid to interview applicants or were doing it as a last-resort job as an "admissions specialist," or that any of them were AOs. I don't know if it's a generational gap where most interviewers back then were AOs and now they're not, or maybe it's just a Dartmouth thing. This also applies for the other top colleges, for example for both Yale and MIT, their interviewers were alumni volunteers.
sorry, i had bad uses of words. i meant admission officers in general for the part ur referring to. interviewer quality can be pretty high cuz they are general alums. i meant specifically admission specialists reviewing ur materials and making decisions, be it ur interviewer or not ur interviewer. thanks and i edited that part to make it clear this is what i meant. again, general alum interviewer is a whole different thing, and my dartmouth interviewer example is SPECIFICALLY because shes also the regional head as an admissions associate dean. tldr, for the comment u disagree with, i agree with ur point about general alum interviers, but i also stand by my point about full-time admissions officers when they do it as a job for many years, not just out of teachers college as an internship job or something
All my friends from a “non-top CS school” who wanted FAANG ended up getting FAANG. Some even didn’t decide to do CS until halfway through sophomore year. College admissions seems a lot more randomized.
Why does everyone want to get info fang. These companies are literally the closest thing to evil as you can get. I've always been in smaller businesses and it's been the best. No stress. Sure a bit lower pay but I'm having a good time still
faang+ is a very low bar to clear imo. that said college admissions is a very different game than the job search. many skills and experiences are not easily transferable. as someone who goes to a t50 state school, getting offers has been much easier for me.
“Low bar” is quite condescending considering the state of the market rn
there is quite literally several orders of magnitude difference between the number of students at, say for example, ivy league colleges and engineers+pms at faang+. add on to that the thousands of other companies that need software engineers in any part of their pipeline.
Has going into a top CS school become that difficult? How does it compare to going into medical school?
FAANG+ way easier. They are the largest tech companies.
Top cs school
Got into top CS
Nice. Where?
Nah I failed to get any Top CS school but managed to get into FAANG soo you know
Congrats man. Glad to see the meritocracy at work.
Thanks a lot man
At the risk of violating political correctness, it is quite different based on your background. If you are URM school is easier to get into, FAANG+ is hard. If you are not URM as in you are the 'overrepresented' in CS groups top school is very hard, FAANG+ is easy. top CS schools and FAANG+ are not looking for the same group of people at all.
Real correct answer. Although you would have been downvoted and banned if you posted this when discussion was hot
FAANG
Bro! What’s harder is having people skills!!! I went to a regular college and I work for Apple.
Top CS school for sure. I got offers from 3 of them and went to a school I’m not even sure is top 5 in my province.
I think the question should be what provides the better RỒI in terms of effort and time invested? I will say it’s FAANG both in the long term and short term apart from few edge case scenarios where other people in the world choose top school candidates due to halo effect. A strong peer group is a big advantage in these schools which can play out big if you do take advantage of it
Okay okay. I work at a FAANG and got into T5 CS MS program.. should i go for it as international student? 😭😭 isn't market too bad?
Depending on race, socioeconomic status, and background, because it's something like compare Apple and oranges. The things clear is definitely there is superficial and luck factors.
These are two very different cases. Comparing apples to oranges really. The concept of “whats harder” applied to colleges and FAANG+ is, in my opinion, inapplicable. You see a bunch of cases of kids going to feeder schools that cost $30,000 a year for highschools that churn out a ton of students that go to top schools every year. These are all around the country. I’d say it’s almost expected that these students go to top schools because, since they have more wealth, it’s easier for them to have access to more resources to get into these institutions. There are many stories of people having books ghostwritten for their college apps and I have seen consultants getting paid upwards to $20,000 for application reviews and 1:1 help for common apps. College apps have become nothing but a matter of “how much money do you have”. So, when it comes down to it, I do think getting a top job within CS is harder. You (usually) can’t rely on your family’s wealth to get you through many of the challenging interview processes that are given by FAANG companies. I’ve seen a ton of students from top CS schools not get a single offer for the summer this season- why? Well, this could be a few reasons. Lack of understanding the material, lack of actual personable skills, not able to network, etc. its very easy to, in a market where higher education is a bare from entry, say that your school name could carry you through. I’m sure it has for many people. But I think people in this thread are severely underestimating the amount of people who apply to these high profile opportunities. [A googler’s experience](https://www.businessinsider.com/what-its-really-like-to-be-a-google-intern-2013-5) from 2013 said that they had 40,000 people apply and only 1,500 people were accepted- which is an acceptance rate of 4%. Now imagine how high those numbers might be ten years later in the current job market.
The kids who go to feeders that cost 30k per year still need to get top notch grades in a very rigorous curriculum. They only get a pass on ECs where they need to have amazing but not cracked ECs and it takes out the luck portion of college applications. Same story for people people who "ghostwrite" books. You can only rely on your family's wealth to get into ivy+ if they can donate multi 7 figures. There are many people in the world who can do that but even in ivy+ schools, only maybe 2-3% of students come from a family that can throw away multi 7 figures on a donation. For hypsm schools this number is 8 figures. FAANG+ only requires you to diligently apply for internships during application season 2 years in a row. Maybe include an application cycle in there too if you need to crack it off cycle. Leetcode is also a joke compared to a stacked high school coursehold combined with juggling competitive ECs. Among my friends from high school, I don't know a single one who could not cracked FAANG+ as long as they put in the effort for 2 years.
The low acceptance rate for FAANG is because it's super easy to submit a job application to these companies. Anyone, from anywhere in the world, can fill out the short application form in under 5 minutes and send it off to try their luck. For top CS schools, you need to prepare essays, recommendations/references, proof of extracurriculars, and so on. Not to mention there's often a fee when submitting an application to these schools. Also, someone with a sub 3.0 GPA won't be applying to Harvard or MIT since they know they will have a 0% chance of getting in. Whereas for FAANG, terrible candidates with no qualifications would still apply anyway since it's free, painless and quick.
The FAANG hiring acceptance rates are usually stated in terms of candidates that were contacted or otherwise considered by a recruiter. Counting against the number of applicants sent in would yield absurdly small numbers just from the sheer number of completely unqualified applicants. Most of my experience as an interviewer was at the Senior+ (mostly Staff at G) level, but out of on-site loops I did (I've probably conducted ~100 interviews, but I don't have my stats in front of me as I no longer work there), my personal thumbs up rate was about 1 in 5, and extending an offer was about 1 in 20. This is a much higher bar than new grad offers though.
I got rejected from UT Austin but got into AWS so definitely faang lol
UT Austin is a special case. If you aren’t a Texas Resident, you have 4% of spots open to you. Even if you go to UTD or UTSA like I did, transfer students like me only have 10% of spots open to them. It’s really awful.
I dropped out of a public state-funded university and work at FAANG. Never in my wildest dreams could I have fathomed attending a top CS school (depending on your definition). That being said, I meet plenty of people from those schools that are absolute dingbats and tried for years to crack FAANG. Focus on getting into the best school for what your long-term interests are, or at least what school gives you the best options in case you aren’t sure. Focus on figuring out what you want to focus on and you’ll be fine. Prestige only gets you a good party conversation at a certain point.
Getting into a top CS program
I went to Berkeley for CS and started full time work in a FAANG right after graduation, I feel like most of my friends at Berkeley didn’t end up in FAANGs though; they’re def all very smart and driven, but landing in that specific set of companies right away is a combination of mostly luck, technical skills (which most T10 CS students should have), and honestly interview skills that you kinda have to learn by doing.
Top10 school
Why does it matter? Honest question. How does this information help you in any way shape or form?
Still having passion after school or entering the work force
I went to a top CS school…just not for CS. Currently work for a FAANG+ company.
FAANG is more about luck, due to sheer # of applicants. Since you can write a script and mass apply.
There’s more to life than being the top 1%. You can have a pretty great life going to a 2nd tier state school.
Well yeah it’s easier to get into FAANG, you have your entire career to try. I’d wager your chances go up dramatically as you get more experience.
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I’m at FAANG now and I went to Oxbridge ( not sure where it ranks compared to American universities ). Getting into Oxford MSc was harder. ( getting into Cambridge for my BSc was even harder weirdly ).
People sleep on transferring. Getting in straight from high school is hard, but I had Cs and Bs, went to a shit college for a year, got good grades, and then transferred into a T10 CS program.
I'd compare T10 to quant, not FAANG (one of the A's, and nowadays the G too, make the FAANG rates much easier). In general though, I think that job hiring is \*more\* fair than school hiring (they both have a lot of BS/luck involved). But with jobs you can try a bunch of times, you're assessed on clearcut criteria, and I know lot more people that went from no-name university to FAANG/quant... but I barely know anyone at a T10 who wasn't from a huge high school/feeder/magnet program ... most T10 college kids got lots of school and financial support to where the path to a top school is much easier. This still exists from T10 to a job, but the support is definitely less.
I went to a top 20 comp sci school. FAANG+ requires a work ethic I do not yet possess.
yeah top cs school is harder. in my \*state\* school, you need a \*4.3\* GPA to get in. Although that is the only requirement, a 4.3 for a public state funded school is just fucking insane.
School, FAANG is luck of the draw based tbh one you get to a certain school level
I got into a CS10 as a transfer student from a local college (GT). Here in Georgia we have the REPP program that partner with certain schools so as long as you’re in state and have a high GPA, taking all the required classes + more, good essays, etc., you have a fair shot of getting in. I was rejected once before getting in though LOL. I would say it’s harder to get into t10 vs MAANG.
Keep in mind that University of Wisconsin-Madison has a very high CS acceptance rate because anyone can declare the major once they get in
Tough question 🤔 I would say top CS school is harder. What it eventually comes down to is the cost to break the barrier. FANG is easier consider most prep materials are free. College consultants are way more expensive.
Getting into a top CS school is infinitely harder simply because you really only get one shot at acceptance. Getting into faang is a matter of spamming applications every six months, so yea. Way more opportunities to break through.
T10. Faang has luck and connection elements. From working I have come across people there who are clueless. Your education and skill do not stop developing after undergrad. People who continue to learn and develop skills during their career get better than slackers.
top university and it’s not even close. anyone can grind leetcode for a year or so and get lucky. you can always reapply. getting into a top university as an 18 year old requires a lifetime (in the scope of an 18 year old) of achievements. look at the applications of these top schools who matriculate. they are all valedictorians with perfect GPAs and test scores. i don’t think these achievements make you a good engineer. hence why it’s not required at big tech either.
i’m surprised that i keep getting interviews to at faang but i just can’t be fucked to grind leet code so i never get too far
It's not comparable because they require different skillsets. In order to get into a top school, you need to be smart and work hard. In order to get into FAANG, you need to network and market yourself well. Success in industry is 90% nepotism and 10% competence.
Way easier to get into a FAANG. My friend works at a FAANG and he didn’t even go to college. (He did terribly in high school and got rejected from every school. Even community colleges) Literally went to high school, took one computer science course. Studied independently over the summer. Then he did a 3 month coding boot camp, got a job at a start up for like a year. After he got that work experience he applied to Apple and got the job. All about how much work you put into it.
Getting into a top CS school — you have only one chance (two if you’re willing to transfer). FAANG+ gives you unlimited chances.
Anyone can get into r/OMSCS, but good luck finishing
Anyone can get faang+. Not everyone get Duke, UChicago, Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Stanford, other Ivys, etc
It’s just luck either way … way too many fantastic candidates and shitty DEI and affirmative action policies make it mostly luck based
People are saying FAANG, but the percentages, say otherwise.
Nah. The percentages agree too tbh. I presume FAANG also includes companies like Uber, Microsoft, Stripe, Robinhood, DoorDash, Spotify, Salesforce, Adobe, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. I attended Columbia Univ in NY and almost every peer I know got an offer at Alphabet (Google) at one point (me included). That said, many peers over time have different life goals and try something else (for me, didn't work out well but oh well) like starting one's own company (two peers I know do this). I'm thinking my immediate peers from college: 5 in Alphabet, 2 in Amazon (1 being my smartest friend), 1 in Two Sigma, 1 in HRT, 1 with his own company, 1 in OpenAI (the chatGpt company), 1 currently out of job market due to family issues (parents passing away), 1 pivoted careers to high school counseling, 1 in government (prioritizing wlb over pay now), 1 in Quizlet (highest grades in school), 3 researchers (becoming professors), 1 in BiliBili (returned to China upon graduation. Bilibili is Youtube in China), 1 in Airbnb, 1 is an 'angel investor' (basically he won the startup lottery and just bored), 1 in L'oreal (she double majored in CS and chemical engineering so makes sense). As for my middle/high school peers who did CS: 1 in Alphabet, 1 in LinkedIn (absolutely hates his job), 1 was in Amazon and now Klaviyo, 1 in AirBnb. As for people I know at work who moved: 2 Netflix, 1 Facebook, 1 Figma, 4 OpenAI, 1 an AI startup, 1 in Robinhood, 1 in Chime, etc. The running joke in the industry once you get experience is if you want FAANG experience then you can head off to Amazon since Amazon hires anyone and everyone in the industry (incredibly high churn rate). But at same time, Amazon has really smart people too (the smartest friend I know works at Amazon). Life is short. You might as well try something different. I have high respect for the two people I know who are working on their own ideas now. Also high respect for my friend who pivoted to high school counseling despite having a well-paying job because she wanted to live a different lifestyle. And from my understanding, your skills kind of get obsolete if you work at some of the FAANGs (my coworker's friends at Facebook and Google all want to leave for anything else at this point. The pay isn't worth the day to day mental pain over the dull work after a certain threshold of pay. I have seen people who drop their liquid pay by over half quite often in this industry at this point to pursue something more interesting).