Land Your Dream Job In Tech

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:

• 🧹 Organize your entire job search (and make it debuggable)

• 🧠 Train your brain to learn interview skills properly and stay healthy throughout the process

• 📃 Apply effectively and efficiently to jobs

• ✅ Have a framework to come prepared into any interview

• 💡 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!

7.4 seconds: That's how long the average recruiter spends on your resume according to this well-documented eye-tracking study. When it comes to tech where any decent job posting will get 100+ applicants in the first 24 hours, this study rings quite true with recruiters almost always spending just 5-10 seconds on a candidate's resume (sometimes less!).

Because of this, you absolutely have to make your resume extremely polished. Despite this, so many software engineers make basic mistakes and phrase their experience incorrectly. The wisdom in this course will get you out of those traps and maximize the chances of your resume surviving the initial screen and getting you an interview. After going through this course, you will:

• 💡 Truly understand the principles behind a stellar resume

• 🗑️ Avoid the common traps that make resumes suck

• 💯 Get maximum credit by best framing your experience

• 📊 Make the right resume based on your level

• 🤔 Know what to do if your resume isn’t enough

The tricky part about writing a stellar resume is that there's so much misinformation online about what makes a good resume, usually coming from people who have never worked at top tech companies. This course cuts through all this noise by giving you time-tested tactics from proven engineering leaders who have been behind the hiring loop from all sorts of companies from FAANG to hyper-growth startups. By completing this course, you will also get a real resume from the instructor himself that you can use as a concrete template.

You have spent 50+ hours sharply refining your resume and LinkedIn profile. You have applied to 1,000+ jobs. However, despite all your hard work, you are getting almost 0 interviews, and when it comes to Big Tech, it's actual 0. What can you do?

There are many options here, but one of the most straightforward, underrated, and powerful ones is to build meaningful side projects. The entire point of a tech company is to build software at scale that gets a ton of users. You don't need to be working in a professional environment to do that - All you need is a computer and an internet connection. After going through this course, you will:

• 💎 Understand what makes a side project valuable

• 🫸 Avoid common traps that produce terrible ideas

• ⚙️ Have a process to generate feasible, quality ideas

• 💡 Follow a framework to judge a project’s quality

• 💪 Set up the right mentality to build projects long-term

This all starts by creating a project idea that you can build on the side (even as a junior engineer) and has market demand. This course will teach you how to do just that. Once you get 10,000+ users, your portfolio will start turning heads, and once you break 500,000+ like this course goes through, tech companies will be breaking down your door to give you an interview, even FAANG.

Open source is a key that can unlock many doors: tremendous learning, compelling career benefits, and industry-wide impact.

Every software engineer inevitably consumes open-source software, but they rarely contribute back. Let's change that! The transition from open source consumer to contributor might feel daunting, but the rewards are enormous.

This course covers everything you need to contribute meaningfully to existing open-source software projects. What you'll learn by the end:

• 🚀 Understand the benefits of contributing to open-source

• 🤯 Set up the right mindset for working in open source

• 💨 Learn how to demystify a new codebase

• 👩🏽‍💻 Master the code and submit changes to it

You'll learn directly from the former Head of Open Source at Meta. James also runs his own sizeable open-source project. What's included:

Open Source Terminology

Let's remove any confusion about the terms you've likely heard thrown around: projects, repos, issues, and pull requests. We'll talk about what exactly open source is and why it has so many benefits for the industry and for you.

Discover How To Contribute To Open Source

With so many organizations and individuals involved in open source, it can be daunting to decide where to contribute. A few critical ideas are covered here:

• Finding something you use (which you may not even realize is open-source)
• Finding companies active in open source development
• Evaluating a project's health so you don't waste your time

Learning The Codebase

We'll cover tips and tricks to make sense of a large project: how do you understand the basics, the most important modules, and learn the social aspect of open-source contributions?

We'll also cover the recommended steps when making commits and landing changes. Ideally, your contributions get reviewed quickly while building trust with the project authors.

Tired of the frustrating LeetCode grind?

The reason people struggle with learning data structures and algorithms (DSA) is that they go about it in the completely wrong way. They jump straight into trying to solve problems without the proper prerequisite knowledge. This is why studying DSA feels like a slow "grind" for many.

If you are going to land your dream job, you are going to need to build your knowledge in a way where you can apply your skills to new problems, when it matters most, on a technical interview.

In this crash course we'll build up your DSA knowledge gradually so you never miss a step. We'll cover the key patterns and concepts that you can leverage to solve the most common interview problems. By the end of this course, you will be able to:

• Solve interview problems about hash-maps, linked lists, binary trees, graphs, and dynamic programming
• Analyze algorithms using Big-O notation so an optimal implementation is achieved
• Visualize and understand core algorithm concepts so you can apply them to solve new problems

This course is designed for beginners, so you don’t need any DSA knowledge to begin. We will start at the fundamentals and increase the difficulty slowly over time; this is the key to truly mastering the concepts.

Once you complete this course, you’ll have the skills you need ace your technical interviews and land your dream job.

If you need additional support taking those skills and actually applying them, take Alvin's complete data structures and algorithms course on Structy. You can try out the concepts yourself in their interactive code editor and learn advanced DSA patterns like stack exhaustive recursion.

Use this link to get 20% off the entire Structy DSA learning experience (discount code TARO20).

Data structures and algorithms, otherwise known as "DSA". Dread it, run from it, LeetCode still arrives, especially if you're trying to get into FAANG. These problems are notoriously frustrating as they're both hard to understand and not relevant at all to what software engineers actually do on the job (including at Big Tech).

Unfortunately, it is effectively impossible to avoid DSA as a software engineer due to top company interviews being full of them. To succeed in tech, you simply must master DSA. On the bright side, you now have this course where we'll teach you how to conquer these pesky problems and maybe even develop a newfound appreciation for them. After going through this course, you will:

• 🔥 Be motivated to grind DSA

• 💡 Understand how to truly learn DSA concepts

• 🗣️ Know how to navigate DSA in a live interview

• 🏔️ See how DSA is proctored at top companies (FAANG)

• 🧠 Set up a proper DSA studying regimen

It's easy to look at data structures and algorithms and feel helpless - We've been there too! But once you truly and deeply understand the overall space and how the best companies administer them differently from everyone else, you'll be crushing your DSA rounds in no time. You simply have to put in the work.

System design interviews are an integral part of the software hiring process. In this course, we dive into what a typical interview is like, what parameters are assessed, and how you can excel in the interviews. If you are a software developer looking to ace your system design interviews, this course is for you.

Here is what you will learn:

1. What happens in a system design interview
2. The dos and donts when designing a system
3. How you can prepare for an interview
4. What metrics are used to score a candidate
5. How you can self-evaluate your interview performance

Have you watched hours of YouTube videos on system design, but still freeze up during the real thing? Are you concerned about how you present yourself to interviewers?

Discover a different approach to system design interview prep with our video series. We’re moving beyond just technical solutions to focus on mastering the interview process itself so you can show your expertise and interview confidently.

In this course, you will:

• Watch Common Mistakes: Explore mock interview clips that highlight frequent errors made by candidates.

• Analyze Reasons Why: Delve into the underlying causes of these pitfalls.

• Improve: See a practical example of how candidates can successfully navigate these challenges.

The clips are organized around four critical themes for interview success:

1. 🧘 Staying Focused on the Problem: Learn how to keep your technical discussion centered on the most crucial issues.

2. 🗣️ Communication: Develop the skills to articulate your technical ideas clearly and effectively.

3. 💭 Thinking Like an Engineer: Adopt an iterative problem-solving approach and adapt to new information.

4. ✍️ Driving the Design: Approach your interview with strategic intent and purpose.

This course provides you with real-world examples that will elevate your system design performance. Equip yourself with our strategies to confidently ace your next interview and make a lasting impression!

Data structures and algorithms problems (i.e. LeetCode) suck up all the attention among software engineers when it comes to interviews. However, you need to master far more than LeetCode to land a quality tech job (even at FAANG). If you want to succeed on the software engineer interview journey, you absolutely have to get good at what's actually the most important interview type: Behavioral interviews.

Here are the attributes of behavioral interviews that make them so critical:

• You will encounter them on every interview loop from Big Tech to early-stage startups
• They can screen you out early (often at the recruiter pre-screen)
• They're used extensively for leveling
• You cannot fail them and still get an offer

Despite this, many engineers see them as a fairly meaningless and "fluffy" exercise. This leads to them struggling with behavioral interviews, often not realizing that they're getting hard rejected on these rounds! By taking this course, that won't be you anymore. After going through it, you will:

• 🧠 Have the right mentality to answer any behavioral question well
• ✅ Understand good vs. bad behavioral answers
• 📖 Use the right tactics to prepare properly
• 🤔 Possess the skills to vet the company
• 📊 Know what behavioral performances look like across different levels

The beautiful thing about behavioral interviews is that by improving at them, you just become a better software engineer overall. Skills like effective communication, speaking with charisma, and empathizing with others are fundamental skills that are useful anywhere at any stage in your career.

Your ability to negotiate is undeniably one of the highest-leverage skills you can learn. But tech workers are lousy at negotiation!

This course is designed for tech employees who are actively or passively in the job market. Candidates who proactively think about negotiation during their job search can increase their compensation by 10s or 100s of thousands of dollars with a few extra hours of work (I'm proof of this!).

Negotiation is not that complicated. It's not even that difficult.

If you have (1) a desire to get paid more and (2) the ability to tolerate some uncertainty, you have everything you need to manufacture leverage and negotiate a higher compensation. This course teaches you how to do exactly that.

We'll demystify how successful negotiations work so you feel confident in discussions with recruiters and hiring managers.

Here's what you'll gain by the end of the course:

• ✊🏽 Understand if and when to negotiate

• 🔮 Create leverage for negotiations

• 💰 Deconstruct the best ways to improve your TC

• 📝 Share concrete tactics and phrases to employ

This course is broken down into 3 major parts:

1. Principles - How does negotiation work and why is it worthwhile?
2. Planning - What should you do (and not do) before and after you receive an offer?
3. Tactics - What is the best course of action for various scenarios?

We'll also cover tips for common situations such as:

• Negotiating your current compensation at your job
• Negotiating when you have a single offer
• Dealing with exploding offers

Finally, we'll also share specific phrases that have been used successfully by dozens of engineers, for you to adapt/copy/steal into your own negotiation playbook.

This course is the distillation of 100s of hours of experience and feedback from negotiation: 100s of conversations with other tech employees, dozens of conversations with recruiters, and the author's own journey with negotiation across 10+ companies.

One of the best things you can do for negotiations is to land several offers. If you need help with that, take this course first: [Course] Ace Your Tech Interview And Get A Job As A Software Engineer