I graduated from my masters program on may 2026, and I have finally landed a Software Engineering role (base pay 90K, benefits ~10K). I will take a month break, and start applying to get a decent job.

Edit: I applied to around 470 jobs in the past 4 months to get reached out by 10 recruiters interviewed at 2. Both went to final rounds and messed up a big role (200K+ in the final round) and landed the other role.

Sorry for posting this again, but wallstreetquant bots are downvoting the post to reduce its reach, i request you all to please upvote this post and share it so that it reaches more people. The earlier post went from about 30 upvotes to zero in about 10 mins

Most of you are already aware of this, but I am making this post so that others know about it as well.

WallStreetQuants bootcamp is garbage. They price it at $5,000 and then offer a "scholarship" to virtually everyone, bringing the cost down to $3,000. For that price, they teach "interview prep" and a basic "finance project", both of which can be done far better using free resources and books.

They also claim that many of their previous students work at top firms like SIG and even provide their LinkedIn profiles as proof. However, when you actually contact some of the people they claim are former students, they say they have never even heard of WallStreetQuants. Once they get your email address, they start spamming your inbox and eventually invite you to a "free consultation" call. During the call, they pitch their bootcamp and claim that former students with weak backgrounds - non-target schools, low GPAs, little or no experience, etc. - successfully broke into quant after joining their program. The only problem is that the people they claim are former students have never even heard of them.

They have also carefully spammed Reddit with fake positive reviews so that whenever someone searches for "WallStreetQuants reviews", only positive posts show up.

TLDR: No quant bootcamp can get you into quant. There are more than enough free resources available to help you ace interviews, build the required knowledge, and create strong resume projects. Please explore all the free resources before buying anything out of FOMO.

P.S. Pls upvote this post so that more students become aware of this.

For all the wallstreetquant shills reading this, dont worry, i will keep posting this regularly on reddit and linkedin so that students are aware that your bootcamp is garbage :)

I am currently an SDE at Amazon (L5, EU), working mostly on backend/Java, and I would like to transition to Jane Street, Citadel, or a similar HFT firm as soon as possible.

I come from a less well-known university with a degree in Information Technology, and I have completed multiple internships. I consider myself someone who understands business value well.

Would a transition like this be realistic?

Should I focus on learning C++, and if so, to what depth? I already have a strong DSA knowledge, but I’m not sure how to prioritize my preparation and focus on the things that matter most.

What would be a realistic timeline for making the switch?

What would be the best path to get there? Any advice from people who have made a similar transition would be greatly appreciated.

Just wanted to share this because the number is kinda insane when I think about it now.

I’m an international student in the US and over the course of my job search I’ve probably submitted somewhere around 7,500 applications. I stopped keeping the exact count after a while.

A LOT of ghosting, automated rejections, failed interviews, interviews I thought I did well in and still got rejected, resume changes, Leetcode, applying to the same companies again and again etc.

And somehow the search ended with two offers from Amazon and Apple.

The funniest part is that I didn’t even apply to the Apple role. A recruiter found my profile/resume and reached out to me about an AI/ML Software Engineer position.

Went through the technical interviews, the loop, manager conversations and eventually got the offer.

Amazon also came through with an SDE offer around the same time.

I ended up choosing Apple.

Not really posting this as a “never give up!!!” thing because honestly 7,500 applications is fucking absurd and nobody should need to do that.

Just wanted to put one data point out there for anyone currently getting destroyed by this market.

7,499 applications can go nowhere and application 7,500 can completely change the outcome.

Job search finally over. Thank god. Radhe Radhe 🙏🏼

Usually, I am honest when answering this question and I usually just put Linkedin or Handshake. But I am having second thoughts about whether its possible to optimize this part of my application as well.

I feel like recruiters would want you to have learned about their company through career event or some kind of in person event rather than linkedin. Or at least through their company website.

Does anyone here know if this question can be optimized or not? And if so, can you give me a rating scale for what is the best and worst answers to write here?

Also, if I write campus event, will recruiters ask about it during an interview? Cause if they ask then I would be cooked.

Anyone who got powerday for Capital One’s internship program, what was the AI technical round? I don’t see any information on it online since it’s new.

If you have powerday and haven’t gone to it yet we should stay in touch feel free to DM

I'm a software engineer at Microsoft with ~3 YOE. Over the last few years I've gone through a lot of SDE interviews, including interview processes with companies like Google, Uber and Amazon.

Recently I was talking to one of my juniors who's preparing for placements, and I realised how confusing the whole process can be when you're in college.

What DSA topic should I actually focus on?

Is my resume good enough to get shortlisted?

How do I explain my projects?

What does an actual big-tech coding interview feel like?

Am I even preparing in the right direction?

I've already spent way too much time learning these things through trial and error, so I thought I could help a few students who are currently preparing.

I can help with:

• Resume reviews

• DSA/interview preparation strategy

• Mock coding interviews

• Project/resume discussion prep

• Big-tech interview expectations

• Identifying where you're currently weak and what to work on

Not trying to sell some course or promise anyone a FAANG job lol.

I'm thinking of doing 1:1 sessions with a few students and seeing if it's genuinely useful.

Happy to answer questions in the comments too.

Edit-wallstreetquant shills are downvoting this post using bots. please upvote this so that more people know about this scam.

Most of you are already aware of this, but I am making this post so that others know about it as well.

WallStreetQuants bootcamp is garbage. They price it at $5,000 and then offer a "scholarship" to virtually everyone, bringing the cost down to $3,000. For that price, they teach "interview prep" and a basic "finance project", both of which can be done far better using free resources and books.

They also claim that many of their previous students work at top firms like SIG and even provide their LinkedIn profiles as proof. However, when you actually contact some of the people they claim are former students, they say they have never even heard of WallStreetQuants. Once they get your email address, they start spamming your inbox and eventually invite you to a "free consultation" call. During the call, they pitch their bootcamp and claim that former students with weak backgrounds - non-target schools, low GPAs, little or no experience, etc. - successfully broke into quant after joining their program. The only problem is that the people they claim are former students have never even heard of them.

They have also carefully spammed Reddit with fake positive reviews so that whenever someone searches for "WallStreetQuants reviews", only positive posts show up.

TLDR: No quant bootcamp can get you into quant. There are more than enough free resources available to help you ace interviews, build the required knowledge, and create strong resume projects. Please explore all the free resources before buying anything out of FOMO.

P.S. Pls upvote this post so that more students become aware of this.

For all the wallstreetquant shills reading this, dont worry, i will keep posting this regularly on reddit and linkedin so that students are aware that your bootcamp is garbage :)

Design a distributed web crawler for Google that continuously discovers, fetches, and indexes billions of web pages while respecting politeness constraints and avoiding duplicate work.

Requirements:

• Manage a seed and discovered-URL frontier, prioritized for crawl order
• Fetch pages while honoring robots.txt and per-domain rate limits
• Extract links and enqueue newly discovered URLs
• Detect and skip duplicate and near-duplicate content
• Schedule recrawls by page freshness and importance
• Handle diverse content types and transient fetch failures gracefully

Scale/constraints:

How would you design this?

I'm a junior at a t10/t5 CS school (depending on the list) and haven't landed any internship that wasn't unpaid. Now while I do admit I AM IN NO WAY cracked. In fact I'd say I'm a little below average for my school in terms of purely CS majors. However I do have several decent side projects, research and I do go to a target school for CS.

I'm getting rejected from jobs that most people back in 2020 would use as a stepping stone for a job they actually wanted. I know it sounds entitled but lets be honest no one that works hard does it all for some shitty barely appreciated general swe role in a company that does most of its work with word and excel. It just so insane to me the massive hoops you have to go through to even get a decent internship let alone a good one. I don't like scrolling this sub because it just reminds me of how shit the job market is but atp I don't know what to do.

87k base
7.5k sign on
8% performance bonus
10% profit sharing

just had my powerday for the capital one tech intern program, ive seen mixed things on what the return rate/ turn around time is.

Does anyone know when you usually hear back/ what percent of interviews become offers? Idk how good i did so lowkey stressing a bit

EDIT: Any insight/ anyone else whos recruiting rn would be helpful

I have a strong, impact-focused resume, a FAANG internship, solid projects, and a 4.0 GPA.

For those who’ve cracked Uber interviews, what helped you stand out and land the interview?

I am applying to Google SWE internship for summer 2027, and I really want to optimize my chances of getting in.

What should I select as my #1 preferred location? Does anyone have any metrics on acceptance rates / cultures between different offices? I feel like the HQ office will hire the most interns, but it might not be the most optimal for getting in since everyone is gonna select this office as their preferred location.

Got a Power Day invite for Capital One's TIP final round (3 interviews: coding, case, behavioral). Not too worried about behavioral, but curious about the other two:

• Agentic coding round: What did the tasks actually look like (were they like the tagged on Leetcode, and how much should you rely on the AI vs. do yourself?
• Case round: Business scenario + they hand you code to evaluate/enhance, ending in a recommendation. Anyone remember the format/what they're really testing for? How hard was enhancing/debugging the codebase?

Would love to hear from anyone who's been through it!

Does it give any noticeable connections the companies for a full time offer? What are the benefits/cons?

Has anyone here gone through the interview process for the Graduate Software Developer position at Squarepoint Capital?

If so, what was the process like, and what types of technical questions did you get? I’d especially appreciate any advice on what to focus on when preparing.

Hello, I was wondering if anyone has had any experience interviewing for any of the Optimus software teams at Tesla? The position I am being interviewed for is Software Engineer, Scenario Evaluation, Optimus Simulation, but the listing is very broad. I was told to focus on Python - CS Fundamentals (Coding, DS&A’s, Multithreading, Concurrency, etc.) questions. Didn't see much online about any of the Optimus software (I think this is a non-ml role?), roles, so was wondering if anyone had any experience. Thanks!

What I mean to ask is to all companies prioritize their interns over new grads who go through interview loop, or it just depends?

Like would someone who is a strong performing intern get preferred over someone who is strong in the interview loop? What if it’s matched to a different team

I just need some direction on what to do to maximize job offers.

Right now, here are my projects:

• Autonomous Navigation with Reinforcement Learning in NVIDIA Isaac Lab
• Violence Detection using YOLO pose estimation and a custom CNN/Transformer model.
• Automatic License Plate Recognition System with YOLO, crops them, and runs OCR with EasyOCR/PaddleOCR.
• Real-Time Alphanumeric OCR with a from scratch CNN: real-time alphanumeric character recognition from desktop webcam or app from Android camera streams.
• Full-Stack RSVP Management Platform
• 2D Multiplayer Tactical Shooter: custom ECS game engine and a Java WebSocket server

Right now, I am an undergraduate student at SNHU, I graduate in spring 2027.

For my resume, just for the tech side of things (I've held previous non-tech jobs like salesman, phone repair, etc), I was at a local startup company for 11 months. I was an intern from June to Dec and then got bumped up to a software engineer with promised equity. From June to May, I never got an official document of the equity. I had paper showing what they were going to give but never had any legal equity agreement. I then decided to leave in May since they never fully gave me the promised equity.

So now I am in a situation where I am just in school without a full-time job, and I have been applying to jobs and have gotten several interviews that went multiple rounds but never an offer. I have applied to about 550 in-person jobs that are within a 7ish hour distance from where I live.

My questions are:

• Should I wait till graduation to apply for more jobs?
• Should I freelance websites for local businesses around me until I get a full-time job offer?
• Should I not freelance and build one more project that would possibly look better than the ones to replace on my resume?
  • The idea I had was a console-style PC gaming platform that uses Steam, Epic, etc, using just a controller for interface for browsing, launching, managing games, using scanline sync (for 60 hz screens), profiles, launcher integrations, game discovery, per-game configuration profiles, process management, and performance monitoring
• Should I focus on just LeetCode?
  • I am not targeting FAANG, just businesses that pay the average range that are around my area. Out of all the technical interviews I've had, none of them were LeetCode style.

Thank you for your time in reading and answering!!

I'm a senior CS student with basically no actual student activities that I could add to my cv.
I already have some internships, but still I wanna add some extra circular activity. So I have a question. Are student activities/volunteering actually a big deal when getting any opportunities in tech? Or is having some good projects and internships enough?

I have a Pinterest account where I share my photography there and I have good audience there, so is it worth mentioning that as an EC?

I'm gonna be in my last year in college, which is quiet heavy, and I'm so unsure on whether I should only focus on college, projects, and technical skills in general or if I should be a part of a club or leadership program? I feel like I have a lot on my plate so is it really a big deal? I have some peers doing so and I'm not sure if it will really benefit me when wanting to land an internship or job. I have a pretty good technical side on my resume, but not sure if that's enough.

Also I would like to know any suggestions on extracurricular activity ideas that would be beneficial and that wouldn't take much of my time, something with low commitment. I was thinking about trying out teaching in a workshop or something like that, not sure yet, so I'll appreciate any suggestions from you guys!

Project RELAY is a youth-led nonprofit teaching displaced and refugee students digital and coding skills so they can thrive in a tech-driven world. We're running a hands-on "Secret Agent Cryptography" workshop where students write their first real Python program, and we need remote volunteers to help prepare the resources and materials behind it.

What you'd do (all remote): help build slides, translate materials (Dari, Pashto, Spanish, English), design worksheets, or prep the coding activities. Flexible hours, work from anywhere.

What you get:

• Verified volunteer hours
• A meaningful project for your college applications
• Leadership roles for ongoing contributors
• Real experience with a growing nonprofit making direct impact

No teaching required, and you don't need to be an expert coder to help. If you care about education, refugees, or tech, we'd love to have you.

Interested? Reach out to [projectrelayorg@gmail.com](mailto:projectrelayorg@gmail.com) or fill out this form.