Google engineer shares how he cracked job interview after two rejections: ‘You’re applying for a recruiter'

An engineer at Amazon who finally landed a job at Google after two unsuccessful attempts, has valuable tips for young techies aiming to be placed at one of FAANG (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Alphabet) companies. 

Sahil Gaba had joined Amazon after graduating from college. He was contacted by a recruiter to interview him at Google. He had been interviewed at the search engine giant twice before in 2016 and 2018, but the efforts did not materialise into an offer.

Gaba told Business Insider website that he had faced hundreds of rejections and was struggling to get a job. He termed the two failed attempts at Google as ‘another rejection’ for him. 

The techie said he had stopped caring about the outcomes of the interviews because he had taken and failed in so many of them. He said it is quite ‘liberating’ with that mindset before facing an interview.

After rejections, finally a job offer

bu. Sharing his success story, he had useful advice for the aspiring techies wanting to crack big tech interviews.

Gaba said that in the coding rounds, there are two parts to solving a question, i.e coming up with a solution and writing the code. He said that although he was under more pressure while writing the code earlier, the more years of experience took away part of that stress. 

He recalled switching his programming language of choice from Java to Python in the interviews, a move still debated in the tech industry. Gaba said that change of language sped up his coding ability in the interviews.

He also said that interviewing with Google when he had a job took away some pressure off from him. In the second interview, Gaba said he was looking for an immediate exit from his current job at that time, which had put a lot of pressure on him.

Gaba said he set up interviews at Meta, Google, and Uber close to each other so that offers if he got them, would come at the same time, resulting in getting him a slightly upper hand while negotiating for salaries.

Lastly, Gaba said he relied heavily on referrals to apply for big tech jobs. But after exhausting all referrals and not getting a job, he started to apply directly to the companies on their job portals. He told the website, "Essentially you're not applying for a job, you're applying for a recruiter."