Ask HN: Should I give up on FAANG as a low IQ late 30s engineer?
6 by lowiqfangwannab | 11 comments on Hacker News.
I am a software engineer in my late 30s and I've been trying unsuccessfully to join faang for a year now. I am unable to pass any type of leetcode challenge. I can barely do leet code easy questions and it takes me ages to get it. I have tried memorising solutions, patterns and grinding problems over and over. I have gone through a few algorithms books (CLRS) but i find the maths and proofs really hard. Bitwise, Recurrence relations and DP give me nightmares so do maze traversal and flood filling problems, I am astonished people can actually get through these interviews the way FAANG demands nowadays (perfect solution to leetcode HARD on a whiteboard, while explaining your thought process outloud, hints given are counted against you). This is pure insanity to me, i am slow, my iq is not that high, i have social anxiety and find it really hard to articulate my thought process as I solve problems in a more instinctual way (i.e does this feel right or not?) I need to look up stuff all the time as my memory is not very good as well. Then there's the system design rounds where they expect you to come up with a quad tree and know every single cache hit, memory and cpu cost by heart. I am considering joining a bootcamp for interviews but it is 6k and I am not sure if its worth it for me given my limitations. I really need the money and security plus having faang in my resume opens doors, i have seen it in my current organisation where they hired ex faang tech leads and they are considered the best of the best by everyone. These are the only reasons I am willing to put up with this. Is it a good idea for me to continue to put effort into this? I only have my full time job but have no friends or family so i have a lot of spare time to put into this. Does anyone have any similar stories of old mediocre developers getting to faang? Is there a recommended pathway for people in this situation? Thanks in advance.