As someone without a degree, getting an interview at the Big 5 was quite easy. Passing those interviews is another thing entirely but having the right experiences in your resume has been more important in my case.
That's the thing, right now, I don't really have the "right experiences" that's why startups do seem appealing.
I have the skills people are looking for but not the resume validation with internships, the right degree, or school. I got an internship at the start of my intensive where I got to work on some fun problems and used my marketing skills too.
I think the only other track would be through open source contributions. If we circled back in December or January, I wouldn't be surprised if I ended up at a non-tech SMB, small consultancy, or startup because of my prior experiences in marketing paired with my new SWE skills.
Something I was wondering, in your experience or anyone reading, do I have to always focus all the technology stacks for each role and project or can I focus more on the problem I solved?
For example, in my internship, for one problem that made a big difference was setting up all their email automation and tieing it into their website. That project wasn't a ton of programming but my work; but by the end got them about $150k in revenue with my other work on their Black Friday sale, as an intern. Most of the SWE projects I got started but wasn't able to finish in the 3 months (priorities kept changing) like a tool that converted audio from videos into searchable indexes for their youtube videos (granular text searchable video basically). I'm hoping to redo that project on my own. I did get their website to speed up though (an older WordPress website).
Absolutely focus on the problems you've solved, and also the problems you failed to solve after getting deeply involved in them.
They know that you'll have to learn their proprietary technology stacks, which are always both ahead and behind the public stacks they inspired. At some companies they won't ask anything about your resume keywords after the phone screens.
Most Big 5 companies use what's called "Behavioral Interviewing" or "S.T.A.R." to formally assess how you get stuff done, and the technical questions can be answered in almost any language you like. Hell I've given successful answers to Big 5 "tell me about a time when you had to…" questions based on experiences in bicycle manufacturing and nonprofit administration, but it really has to involve ownership if you're straying from the norms.
I'm good at "S.T.A.R.", most of my effort in the past is using CAR and PAR but it's not a hard shift. I'm glad to hear they don't limit it to just technology problems.
>"the problems you failed to solve after getting deeply involved in them".
I have done it before in interviews when asked about weaknesses or failures; I've never done it on a resume though. How would you go about representing that on a resume?
I think this might be true if your lucky I was up for a FANG position in London but I have an atypical education I I suspect my lack of a degree counted against me.
With the best will in the world some low level recruiter working out of Spain is not going to be able to read between the lines and work out that actually working for a world leading RnD org on campus at one of the elite UK universities might actually mean I was a good candidate.
I'm like you, I've got some really niche experiences. I went to a #1 program at an arguably #1 school for undergrad for the industry I was planning on going into. I also have a unique personal background (extensive life-long travel) which has been helpful in more than one way but it's hard to see that on my resume.
