Ace Your Tech Interview And Get A Job As A Software Engineer
Finding a job as a software engineer sucks. From "gotcha" data structures and algorithms (DSA) problems to recruiters ghosting you, the tech interview grind is often miserable. The sad thing is that universities and bootcamps are terrible at adequately preparing new talent for the brutal realities of the engineering job market.
This is why this course exists: It is the comprehensive resource you need to fully understand the many ins and outs of the software engineer interview grind. After going through this course, you will:
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🧹 Organize your entire job search (and make it debuggable)
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🧠 Train your brain to learn interview skills properly and stay healthy throughout the process
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📃 Apply effectively and efficiently to jobs
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✅ Have a framework to come prepared into any interview
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💡 Understand all common interview types and how to approach them
Now you might be looking at this and wondering, "Wait, where's the advice on becoming a LeetCode master?". This is 100% intentional and not a mistake: Over-indexing on DSA is easily the #1 way software engineers mess up their job search. While the vast majority of online resources help engineers with this portion, there is far, far more to the interview journey. It's why most engineers never break into FAANG - They don't master the multitude of other crucial interview mechanics besides DSA. Take this course and you will learn those mechanics!
Alex Chiou is a proven Silicon Valley engineer with 10 years of experience across top tech companies like PayPal, Course Hero (now Learneo, a $3.6B unicorn), Meta, and Robinhood. His success is also reflected in his compensation:
- 2014: Alex was making $85,000 per year as a clueless new grad at PayPal 🤓
- 2021: Alex was making $750,000 per year as a high-performing tech lead at Robinhood 😎
In just 7 years, Alex was able to increase his pay by a staggering +800%. While a lot of this was due to promotions and his personal growth, a huge portion was also due to the 3 company switches he made across his career. It's hard to reach the top without changing jobs, and Alex took that idea to the bank 🏦.
Interview 0 -> Interview Hero
Alex graduated UCLA as a lackluster student, just barely maintaining a ~3.0 GPA. He entered the tech job market as an even more lackluster interview candidate who was too lazy to do LeetCode. It took him 25+ failed interviews before landing the offer for his first job at PayPal.
Fast forward to his later years and Alex was passing his interviews with far more ease at better and better companies, having learned from his many failures of the past. For Meta and Robinhood, he only had to study a few hours (<5) to pass their behavioral and system design rounds!
Inspiring Others To Job Success
Alex has mentored thousands of software engineers towards cracking the interview for their dream jobs. Here's just a small list of the top tech companies Alex has empowered engineers to get into:
- Meta
- Amazon & Twitch
- Snap
- Microsoft
- Workday
And this is just the big publicly traded companies. Alex has also landed many engineers into positions at cutting-edge startups.
On top of the stellar selection of companies, Alex has helped engineers from all sorts of backgrounds ace their tech interviews:
- Junior and senior - Alex has helped both struggling new grads and senior engineers with 10+ years of experience.
- US citizens and new immigrants - Being on a visa makes the job search much harder, and this is an obstacle Alex has coached several mentees through, even helping an international student land a role at a top startup.
- Traditional and non-traditional - One of the engineers Alex helped get into Workday didn't even have a Computer Science degree!
From The Other Side Of The Table
The last big reason why Alex is perfect to teach this course is that he's thoroughly seen the interview from both sides and built a deep understanding of what the world looks like through the eyes of the interviewer (i.e. the person giving the questions) and the (often struggling) candidate.
Alex was an interviewer at every company he's ever worked at, giving 250+ interviews, with ~100 of those being at Meta. He's reviewed 1,000+ resumes and been in the room for many hire/no-hire decisions. He's done every interview type from phone screen to onsite and DSA to behavioral. At Course Hero, he was their 1st Android engineer and tech lead, so he wrote their entire Android engineer interview process from scratch.
With all this experience, Alex has seen every possible way a software engineer job candidate can fail during their interview grind:
- He knows why they have to desperately apply online into a black hole with minimal results
- He knows why their resume doesn't even make it past the initial screen, not even getting the chance to talk to a human
- He knows why they completely choke during the interview despite having studied for 500+ hours
With this course, Alex is teaching you how to learn from the countless mistakes both he and his thousands of prior mentees have made.
very useful tips
this is excellent
This is a very helpful course, I highly recommend it.
This course provided a step-by-step framework for approaching your job search strategically, addressing both the technical and mental challenges.
I particularly appreciated that it covered common failure modes and explained what to do instead.
I've delivered the advice in this course to many of my mentees, but this course delivers it in a structured way with clear tactics and advice. 10/10
I've been loving the job search course. I'm not kidding when I say that this is the best job search course I've seen. Here are all the things I love about it:
- I love how the course is modular, so I can just tune in to whatever aspect of the job search I need.
- This course feels like you've condensed all your knowledge about job searching from talking to 1000s of people into a 4.5 hour course so it's really high signal.
- I love how each video has a really detailed response to pretty much any question I might have about the job search.
I took this job search course about a week ago, and today I got 2 recruiters sending me inbound messages about potential roles!
I highly suggest watching the overview - There's a lot of mindset gems and perspective shifts that Alex drops in there.
I cannot tell you how completely this course changed my perspective of job hunting. I am trying to move up the corporate ladder and this course has instructions I follow verbatim. There are 2 perspectives I completely changed after taking this course:
- I completely changed my method of working from that of a sprint to a marathon. I also loved how in this course Alex values every single experience he has had and doesn't put down his more junior-level experiences in comparison to his tech lead ones.
- Tackling problems head on is great, but a lot of the time, even mentally, it's a lot less taxing to just do things and not expect anything in return. I took your advice there and decided to work on going to the gym to make friends.
On top of that, I've done 3 more actionable takeaways from this course:
- Keeping track of the funnel (I apply to 80 - 100 jobs a week)
- Having an accountability buddy. I have two people I met at Taro that keep me accountable - I in turn make sure they find jobs too
- Sharpening my skills at work and outside. I spent less time on LeetCode now
I can already see results as I've landed interviews from top companies like Uber and Ramp.
As someone in the middle of a job search, this was eye-opening. I knew a few aspects of the job search process intuitively, but having the entire process laid out so clearly was incredible. And Alex shares knowledge in a no-nonsense way that is highly appreciated.
As a graduating student with a CS degree, my top priority is to land the best job possible. This course delivered exactly what I needed.
