Struggling CS Grad Aiming for FAANG – Can I Still Make It?

Focus on getting the best offer you can and take it. Don't reject yourself from an offer or an opportunity before you can even get it. This is often a self fulfilling prophecy which hurts career growth.

If I were in your shoes I would go 100% in on leetcoding. For new grad roles leetcode is the key to getting top offers, especially being able to crush difficult OAs is the way to break in. Out of all my friends who cracked faang offers the one thing they had in common was they have solved over 500 problems thru college, completed the difficult OAs which got them interviews. They then crushed the technical rounds and behaviorals for new grad faang are not terribly difficult. The content on Taro is more than sufficient to do well

We're way more capable than you think. Especially with Taro on your side I'm confident youll survive. Plus keep in mind you're at a top uni and coursework is naturally much much much harder than a lot of folks who goto average unis so no need to be so hard on yourself

I think you made the same mistake that a lot of folks make in college of assuming that doing well in school matters. It doesn't: a lot of your classmates are either coasting with borderline grades or cheating to save time.

What does impact your ability to get a top tech job is your ability to ship code. There are 3 factors companies look at:

1. Can you write code independently?
2. Are you able to talk about your code effectively?
3. Are you able to ship code with real user impact?

Often times the candidates who are struggling miss out on at least 2 out 3 of these categories, get frustrated that they're struggling, and deathloop back into whatever behaviors got them stuck in their first place. The priorities of tech are much more aligned with providing practical value in the real world (especially when software is so easy to deploy out). While in school there's a clear rubric and path on a good outcome, this does not exist in tech. Treating succeeding in tech like academics will incur harsh (but fair) outcomes: slow career growth at best, unemployment at average and at worst.

If you want break out of the loop, you need to write code. You need to get into a focus loop where you are constantly writing code, learning as you're writing code, and using those learnings to write better code faster. Side projects are a great place to start (here's a Taro playlist on it).

For picking your first company, beggars can't be choosers. Pick whatever position you can get that's reasonable (factoring in pay, location, hours worked, modernity of tech stack, culture) and work your way up. Unless your bachelors is for comp sci from either Waterloo or Stanford, assume that your options are limited. Big tech will always be around, but the time spent on zero outcomes will never come back.

Feel free to put some time on my calendar if you want to chat more (message me on Slack): I've gone through a lot of struggles after graduating & I currently work a FAANG-adjancent.