HACKER Q&A
📣 throwawaystress

No responses to applications despite experience and MS (data science)


I recently finished a masters in statistics and took multiple machine learning courses in the CS department along the way. I also minored in CS in college and have been "software-engineering-adjacent" for several years, having worked on stored procedures for the backend of a CRM for a couple years, and for a consulting firm doing data analysis in R and Python.

Despite all that, I never hear back from places I applied to. I'd really like to work at a FAANG (especially Microsoft), and it feels like I'll never get there. I thought that by going to grad school I'd kind of jump-start my career in that direction, and instead I'm doing work in SAS for an insurance company. Meanwhile, I'm watching friends who went to a 3 month bootcamp get jobs as data engineers (which is what I'd like to do), and folks I trained at previous jobs go on to become directors of analytics.

What am I doing wrong? I kind of think I need to go back to the drawing board, as I wonder if I'm just not an attractive candidate.

  👤 necovek Accepted Answer ✓
At least there's no M in FAANG, so once you get into Microsoft, you'd still not be working in a FAANG company :)

Try networking with some of those MS people you'd be looking to work with.

👤 nhgiang
Just my 2 cents: Could it be that the way you present your experience is not focused? You've mastered many difficult topics and proved yourself in many intellectual demanding jobs, that would've made you a desire for many non-FAANG companies. But this time you're aiming for the best of the best, and for them, your achievements may only be average.

It could be that you need to select and prioritize your experience in your CV in such a way that tells the recruiter "I know what you're looking for and I've got it right here".

And even after you got that perfectly, somebody else still could snatch that job from you.

Not trying to sound deep or anything, just want to encourage you to try again :)

👤 yuppie_scum
FAANG is not the be-all-end-all