When Paden Gayle went into his first real round of tech interviews in 2020, he “failed horribly.”
“I thought I’d just have to know how to code, like, ‘Hello World,’ and I’ll get the job,” he said. “I kind of went in there blind, and then I realized, oh, I don’t know anything.”
Gayle interviewed for full-time software engineering roles for X, formerly Twitter, and Bloomberg, as well as an apprenticeship program for Google. He was rejected by all of them.
The following year, he interviewed again for seven companies. This time, he received six offers — but Google once again rejected him for an entry-level position. Gayle said since he had scheduled his interview with Google to ensure the most prep time, it was likely a combination of fatigue and nervousness that led to the failed result.
He then accepted the entry-level software engineering role at Bloomberg, where he remained for three years.
This year, though, Gayle finally got his Google redemption and received an offer for an L4 software engineering role.
Here’s some of his biggest advice for landing a coding gig at a tech giant like Google.
Study the fundamentals
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Before you learn calculus, you have to understand addition and subtraction. Gayle said that coding needs the same mastery of the basics in order to succeed in more complicated interview questions.
After his failed first attempt at tech interviews in 2020, Gayle said he went back to “really crack down on the fundamentals of the problems.”
“So if an interviewer did ask me a question that I wasn’t familiar with, I would still have the background knowledge to work my way up to a solution,” he said. “So that was really my strategy in 2021: to make sure I would be able to land an offer. And thankfully, I landed six.”
Gayle recommended practicing problems using coding interview prep websites like HackerRank or LeetCode, a popular platform among software developers.
However, he said the biggest mistake people make in their preparation is focusing on the number of problems they will solve instead of understanding the reasoning behind them.
“If someone asks you to solve a question using Algorithm A, make sure you understand why you’re using Algorithm A, and be able to explain what are the tradeoffs of it,” he said. “Why are you choosing this one over a different algorithm?”
With LeetCode becoming so ubiquitous among developers, tech companies are also beginning to catch on. Gayle said the chances of seeing a problem from these sites are becoming increasingly low, which causes some people to panic.
For his Google interview, Gayle said that when he first received his questions, he had no idea where to start. Instead, he asked for a minute to look through the problem and dissect what skills would be needed and why.
“I took that 30 seconds, and I’m like, ‘Okay, this looks like I need to do a binary search here, or I need to do DFS here,'” he said.
Gayle recommends doing mock interviews and LeetCode competitions, where developers are given problems that are generally new to the site, in order to get comfortable with questions you’ve never seen before.
“Because at the end of the day, with these tech interviews, half of it is technical, but then also that other half is the communication part,” he said. “That’s also something that I find a lot of people, even when I was doing interviews at Bloomberg, did fall apart in.”
Start early
“I like to tell people, interviewing, job hunting, all of it — it’s not a sprint,” Gayle said. “It’s really just a marathon, and that’s also in your preparation.”
Remember that it’s OK to feel out opportunities while still employed. But it’s also important to be realistic about the current job climate. Gayle said that while job-hunting, he made sure to reign in his expectations about getting an offer.
“I feel like a lot of people have this assumption that 2021 tech is how it should have been. It’s like everyone was getting an offer, and if you didn’t get one, it was weird,” he said. “So when I was interviewing this year, I told myself, don’t have that expectation.”
He added, “It really eased the stress to, oh, let me just see what’s out there and if something happens. And that’s how Google turned up.”
In 2023, Gayle connected with a Google recruiter a couple of months before having to stop the process due to a hiring freeze.
Lockdowns on hirings and sweeping layoffs have run rampant across several companies over the past year, leaving many workers feeling discouraged from finding opportunities. Aside from the worst of the COVID-19 lockdown, US employers are extending job offers at the lowest amount since 2014, Business Insider previously reported.
However, Gayle and his recruiter continued to stay in touch until he was invited to interview a year later. Despite the slumping job market, he said you should still continuously prepare for interviews so that you’re not “starting from zero” when jobs begin to open up again.
“If you’re not prepping for tomorrow, prep for a year from now,” he said. “So when companies do start hiring, you’re ready, versus the person saying, ‘Oh, this market’s bad, so I’m not going to prep now.'”
Rather than condensing a high volume of studying into a short time span, Gayle recommends a gradual re-introduction of skills and practice — like doing one LeetCode problem a day for several months.
“That small repetition can help build your tolerance to LeetCode and not burn you out while also maintaining the knowledge,” he said.
Make and keep ‘real’ connections
When Gayle announced via a LinkedIn post about joining Google, which garnered over 8,000 interactions, he received several messages, most of which directly asked for a referral.
He said only around 30% mentioned his previous work or introduced other connections — and those were the messages he tried to respond to.
“This person at least put in more than 10 seconds of effort to look at my profile and understand what I was doing previously,” he said. “So I’ll give them the respect to reach back out to them.”
Gayle said that ultimately, “people are people” — including recruiters. So, trying to make more human connections will likely help you stand out and stay in touch.
“My recruiter, Karen, on our first conversation, we hit it off talking about music — something very simple,” he said. “So anytime we connected, we made a little comment or joke about that.”
Gayle said he would primarily reach out to people through LinkedIn, but also at in-person networking conferences. He said to seek out conferences within specific communities you identify with, like NSBE or AfroTech if you’re Black, the Grace Hopper Program for women, and Out In Tech for the LGBTQ+ community.
“Find a Discord server, find a subreddit, find a group in LinkedIn where you kind of resonate with what they talk about,” he said. “Because there’s a lot of people looking for a connection, especially in tech, since it can be kind of isolating.”
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