So, after all those hassles in applying to companies I finally got to the real thing, the interview!

Interview

Medallia — October
I only did one interview, it consisted of two fairly simple questions, an ad-hoc and a classic DP problem. I felt that I did pretty well, got a solution instantly, talked through the solution, checked corner cases, wrote comments, etc.
Result — Failed, the interview only lasted for 30 mins, I guess there’s something odd with what I did resulting to instant rejection.

Yelp — November
Same here, one interview, consisted of two questions, a recursion and stack problem. Felt okay, got a solution, covered corner cases, talked about trade-offs, interview lasted for normal 45 mins.
Result — Failed, dunno why.

Facebook — November
Got 2 interviews with Facebook! First one went great. Second one, well, I did solve the problem and covered corner cases.
Result — Failed, maybe I was too slow or my code not concise enough if I remembered.

Yes you read all of them correctly, I blew up my chances on all 3 of them (which I still don’t know why though). Realizing that the interview period has ended, I knew that I have no more chance to intern there. Was pretty devastated at that time. It felt really sad to have put your hopes on high, being so close to your dream and everything, just to have it all ruined in the span of 45 minutes, especially if you consider the 1-year preparation. 😢

It’s bad enough that I got rejected, but I also felt guilty for disappointing my mentor and those who have referred me (although they always said it’s okay). This left me with sadness and emptiness for few weeks…

Until a random day in December, I saw a post for another summer internship at Google Singapore (this was their first time to host summer intern from all countries, previously limited to Singapore students). To be honest, I was like let’s just give it a shot once more, don’t put too much hope on it anymore, just try my best.

Google

Application

I encouraged myself to apply in December, with the referral from an Indo2SV mentor, Sharon (luckily, I met her at Google games before, so we were not complete strangers 😂). Fast forward to February, I finally heard that I will have my first phone interview (yes it’s a pretty long wait) !

Hearing this good news, I began to prepare again. At this part, she also helped me a lot with the preparation, she gave mock interviews and even went extra miles by asking another Googler to also gave me a mock interview! I was so relieved that I could meet kind people at those times. Thanks, Sharon! :)

Interview

Finally, I’m facing the 45-mins breathtaking discussion again.

First interview: Went okay in my opinion, there was a mix of algorithm, data structure and OOP question.

Second interview: An ad-hoc question with some follow-ups. Well, I felt that I bombed this interview, my algorithm was quite complex and missed few edge cases in the beginning, although the final code was correct (I tried to submit the code to online judge due to curiosity and anxiety). Uh, I still think this was my worst real interview.

Phew, at this point I was really anxious waiting for the result. Took more than a month, when finally they told me that I got to host matching phase in April (yay!!). I was really excited that I could at least reach that part, meaning that I was not that bad in interviewing and I’m one step closer!

Little note: I don’t know how I passed that tbh, in the interviews with other companies I felt I nailed it, yet I was rejected. In contrary, I felt I did bad at Google’s, yet I passed. Interview sure works in an unpredictable way. 😕

Host Matching

At this part, what’s left is 2 phone calls with 2 hosts, talking about what projects they have, the team, what skills are they looking for in a candidate. After doing both calls, it’s the waiting game again. I waited for 2 weeks without any news, when suddenly I heard that my friend, Aldi, has been accepted to the internship! This made me even more nervous on my result.

Result

Thus, I sent up a follow-up email to my recruiter again. She then replied me with this. (it’s actually the same date as I am writing this post!)

Oh well, another rejection 😢. Yes, I was pretty sad again, especially it’s even closer than all the things happened the year before. Nevertheless, I’m getting used to it, so I was sad only for few days.

The end.

Conclusion (not yet)

Uh, that would be a pitiful story to end with. I’m not gonna end it with sadness. :)

The day after that rejection, the recruiter explained to me on how she will still try to work it out somehow. I was confused how I should react. Since I didn’t really have hopes on that anymore.

Suddenly that email came, I was on the borderline of happy and not. Like uh, you had rejected me, what else could be done.

However, miracle does happen! Few days later, I got a phone call from my recruiter. The first word she said was “Congrats!”. I couldn’t believe what she said at first, to begin with, it’s already impossible to be accepted after rejection, right?

After a while, I finally accepted that fact, a burst of joy hit me up and I just couldn’t express it into words. I guess that was the happiest moment of my life. Yep it’s not in Silicon Valley, but I’m still working at Google which is also a SV company (and it’s said that you can transfer to SV somewhere in the future too!), which means I was able to fulfill my long-wished dream!!! 😆

Quick note: I still don’t know how it was possible for them to change their result. I tried to ask my recruiter once but it was kept secret. I assume I just got lucky.

Conclusion

It’s a super long post, sorry. For me, it’s an amazing journey full of ups and downs. The story would be really plain if you simply applied and got accepted right? 😂. Hence, I just want to document this journey and hope that this could motivate others or at least got inspired to try to do the same thing,
and to remind me that miracle does happen. :)

In the end, I sincerely want to thank God, all my Indo2SV mentors and people who have helped me to do mock interview. The blessings are countless.
Thank you.

I would love to tell the story about my Google internship too and how to convert it to a full-time offer (not as thrilling at this one), along with the tips and tricks on getting the internship. *If people are enjoying this post and I have enough time of course.

Please let me know if you have any questions or any feedback with my writing! Would really appreciate it.

Lesson learnt: When I looked back through everything, life seemed unfair at first, you practice everything everyday, wishing for the best to come, only to receive rejection after rejection. But to think of it, maybe there had been a better plan destined. If I were to be accepted at other companies at first, I would have accepted the offer and lost all the opportunity to intern at Google.
So keeps your heads up, even if you fail now, something even greater may awaits you in your next journey. :)

P.S. This story will mostly consists of my experience only and might only be relatable if you pursued CS degree in Indonesia. Would love to make another post of how is it like to intern there, some tips and tricks (how to convert it to full-time job). *If people enjoy reading this post and I have another time.

P.P.S. Please treat it as a normal post in a blogspot. This is simply a personal story written in an old blogpot-style, and not the type that will be shared on LinkedIn. I just prefer the simplicity that Medium provides to write a post 😄

Where it all started

Realization

So… going back all the way to November 2016, an ex-coach of my competitive programming club came back to Binus to teach a three days-long training (he was pursuing his PhD at NUS at that time). On the last day of training, he treated me for a food and we started to have some talks (and he shared some turning-point motivations).

One very important thing that I learnt is to set my dream as high as possible; getting a job at top tech companies in Silicon Valley is possible and I shouldn’t limit myself to be satisfied with other intern offers that I have had at that time. Realization is pretty important for me, as many people are still thinking this is impossible and set their bar low (even my parents and friends did not believe it at first 😂).

Research and Reading Through Posts

Shortly after that, it was already December and was the time to make a new-year resolution. Hence, I decided that getting at least one offer from a Silicon Valley company next year should be my goal! I then began to research how to get the internship and found these two blogs that are really inspiring.

• Jessica Handojo: Post
• Rakina Zata Amni: Post + tips and tricks

Kudos to them for writing those posts! They inspire me to write one too. (Hope they will update their blog again) 👏

Back to the story, after gathering some materials and tips, I began to practice doing Leetcode problems every single day, reading Cracking The Coding Interview book, doing mock interviews at Pramp and Refdash, etc.

Indo2SV

Indo2SV (link with wayback machine) is 6-weeks mentorship program from fellow Indonesian professionals for Indonesian university students to help them secureinternship at top tech companies in Silicon Valley

Fast forward to April 2017, I saw the post and invitation to register to this program. I remembered that I was really excited at that time, especially since they weren’t opened for registration in 2016.

Well, to be honest I still didn’t have a concrete idea of how I was going to be noticed by any of the tech companies (I didn’t have any acquaintances who was really able to vouch and refer me). Thus, knowing about this opportunity sparked hopes that I will at least be able to get an interview at SV companies!

So, for the selection of Indo2SV, it consists of resume screening, 1 round of phone interview and another 2–3 rounds (I got 3 phone interviews, but some of my friends got 2, I’m not sure how it was arranged) of phone interview to match candidate with a mentor.

11 August, woke up to this message, woohoo! I got super happy and thought, okay this is real I might really have a chance for a SV internship.

There are a total of 10 members who are also accepted into the program (1 of them interned together with me last summer!)

Training

As mentioned before, Indo2SV is a 6-weeks mentorship program, and so I began to learnt so much in these 6 weeks. I’ll try to list what I did in each week (maybe this can help some of you to figure out a learning plan):

Week 0

• Briefing & kick-off
• Self-study on Array, Linked List, Stack, Queue
• Prepare answer to “Tell me about yourself” and questions to be asked at the end of the interview

Week 1

• Self-study on Heap, Disjoint Set, Graph
• Start companies list and research

Week 2

• Self-study on Tree and Balanced Tree
• Write a resume and cover letter

Week 3

• Self-study on Sort and Search
• Research behavioral questions and prepare some answers
  Okay, maybe some of you will think “what, why do we even need to do this”. Well, I understand that this kind of response shouldn’t be made up and should be as instantaneous as possible, but for some people (yep, I’m looking at you fellow engineers), it is hard to explain everything in one go without being too short or too long (let alone explain this in English with clarity). Hence, it won’t hurt to put effort into this and still be genuine with the response.

Week 4

• Self-study on Recursion and DP
• Go through some system design questions and prepare answers
• Study basic computer science theory (OOP, concurrency, network, database, compiler)

Week 5–7

• Mock interviews with other mentors
• Start to apply!

So what happen each week is a session of self-study, followed up by a mock interview with mentor on materials previously studied. We also discussed things like behavioral questions and resume design. Some of the tasks lasted for more than a week though. For instance, my resume kept being revised until the 5th or 6th week, since my mentor paid attention to details and kept iterating it!

A glimpse on my preparation at this point:

• 30+ mock interviews on Pramp, 5–10 on Refdash and around 15 interviews with all the mentors
• 600+ interview problems from Leetcode ranging from easy-hard questions

Nevertheless, it was really fun! I didn’t feel any pressure doing any of the task given (although I felt bad every time I bombed the mock interview) and excited with the fact that I’m actually talking to SV Engineer every week!
Still grateful up to this day. Thanks, Andrego! :)

Applying to Companies

This is where luck and having a good networking plays a huge part. For an Indonesian student, applying to SV companies is completely different with applying to Indonesian companies. In Indonesia, every friend of mine that tried to apply to a top-tech company, will at least got noticed, got their email replied and even got an onsite interview. :)

On the other hand, SV companies, well.. if you could get a reply mail saying that you are rejected, it’s definitely better than nothing (even better if it was sent by human and not an auto-reply machine 😂). Jokes aside, this really happened to me when I was applying. So here’s the story.

I applied to 70+ companies (yes 70, that’s a lot, but I know some people applied to even more than that), ranging from the top ones (Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc.) up to startups that we all never heard of. Result?

• 3 gave an interview.
• 30 rejected with a mail.
• 30–40 others? Umm, I don’t know, never heard back from them.

I think this is mainly due to how hard it is to get the H1B visa, which caused companies to be hesitant to bring candidates to US (and partly due to my resume having no stellar achievement 😢). Meanwhile, you need a SV internship on resume to have a chance for a job in SV. This is the main problem that I felt as an Indonesian student; the entry barrier is just too high.

Well that’s a lot of hardship to begin with, but let’s take a look at the bright side, I got 3 interviews! These companies are Medallia, Yelp, and Facebook, all of them was a result of me being referred through my mentor’s network.

Maybe you are asking now, wait where is Google? Yep, I didn’t get an interview even after being referred. Let’s talk about the other interviews first.

Fun fact:

• I still keep the full list of companies I applied to, let me know if you are keen on checking that out 😛
• I practiced on Pramp too much that they ran out of questions. I took a screenshot at that time but I lost it. 😕

Interview

Continue to part 2