[**Alex Chiou**](https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexander-chiou/) is a proven Silicon Valley engineer with 10 years of experience across top tech companies like PayPal, Course Hero (now Learneo, a $3.6B unicorn), Meta, and Robinhood. His success is also reflected in his compensation:

- **2014:** Alex was making *$85,000* per year as a clueless new grad at PayPal 🤓
- **2021:** Alex was making *$750,000* per year as a high-performing tech lead at Robinhood 😎

In just 7 years, Alex was able to increase his pay by a staggering +800%. While a lot of this was due to promotions and his personal growth, a huge portion was also due to the 3 company switches he made across his career. It's hard to reach the top without changing jobs, and Alex took that idea to the bank 🏦.

## Interview 0 -&gt; Interview Hero

Alex graduated UCLA as a lackluster student, just barely maintaining a \~3.0 GPA. He entered the tech job market as an even more lackluster interview candidate who was too lazy to do LeetCode. It took him 25+ failed interviews before landing the offer for his first job at PayPal.

Fast forward to his later years and Alex was passing his interviews with far more ease at better and better companies, having learned from his many failures of the past. For Meta and Robinhood, he only had to study a few hours (&lt;5) to pass their behavioral and system design rounds!

## Inspiring Others To Job Success

Alex has mentored thousands of software engineers towards cracking the interview for their dream jobs. Here's just a small list of the top tech companies Alex has empowered engineers to get into:

- Meta
- Amazon & Twitch
- Google
- Snap
- Microsoft
- Pinterest
- Workday

And this is just the big publicly traded companies. Alex has also landed many engineers into positions at cutting-edge startups.

On top of the stellar selection of companies, Alex has helped engineers from all sorts of backgrounds ace their tech interviews:

- **Junior and senior** - Alex has helped both struggling new grads and senior engineers with 10+ years of experience.
- **US citizens and new immigrants** - Being on a visa makes the job search much harder, and this is an obstacle Alex has coached several mentees through, even helping an international student land a role at a top startup.
- **Traditional and non-traditional** - One of the engineers Alex helped get into Workday didn't even have a Computer Science degree!

## From The Other Side Of The Table

The last big reason why Alex is perfect to teach this course is that he's thoroughly seen the interview from *both* sides and built a deep understanding of what the world looks like through the eyes of the interviewer (i.e. the person giving the questions) and the (often struggling) candidate.

Alex was an interviewer at every company he's ever worked at, giving 250+ interviews, with \~100 of those being at Meta. He's reviewed 1,000+ resumes and been in the room for many hire/no-hire decisions. He's done every interview type from phone screen to onsite and DSA to behavioral. At Course Hero, he was their 1st Android engineer and tech lead, so he wrote their entire Android engineer interview process from scratch.

With all this experience, Alex has seen every possible way a software engineer job candidate can fail during their interview grind:

- He knows why they have to desperately apply online into a black hole with minimal results
- He knows why their resume doesn't even make it past the initial screen, not even getting the chance to talk to a human
- He knows why they completely choke during the interview despite having studied for 500+ hours

With this course, Alex is teaching you how to learn from the countless mistakes both he and his thousands of prior mentees have made.

Alex Chiou

Finding a job as a software engineer *sucks*. From "gotcha" data structures and algorithms (DSA) problems to recruiters ghosting you, the tech interview grind is often miserable. The sad thing is that universities and bootcamps are **terrible** at adequately preparing new talent for the brutal realities of the engineering job market.

This is why this course exists: It is the comprehensive resource you need to fully understand the many ins and outs of the software engineer interview grind. After going through this course, you will:

- **🧹** Organize your entire job search (and make it debuggable)

- 🧠 Train your brain to learn interview skills properly and stay healthy throughout the process

- 📃 Apply effectively and efficiently to jobs

- ✅ Have a framework to come prepared into any interview

- 💡 Understand all common interview types and how to approach them

Now you might be looking at this and wondering, "*Wait, where's the advice on becoming a LeetCode master?"*. This is 100% intentional and not a mistake: Over-indexing on DSA is easily the #1 way software engineers mess up their job search. While the vast majority of online resources help engineers with this portion, there is far, far more to the interview journey. It's why most engineers never break into FAANG - They don't master the multitude of other crucial interview mechanics besides DSA. Take this course and you will learn those mechanics!

Ace Your Tech Interview And Get A Job As A Software Engineer

Overview

Get Interviews

Interview Types

Pass Interviews

After The Interview

Conclusion

Mid-Level Software Engineer at Taro Community

Hey Rahul. I got laid off from my previous job. over last 5 years, I've dealt with a series of painful issues at work and personal life. I decided to take a break when I got laid off, to recover my physical and mental health. \
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Its been 4 months, and I want to start interviewing 4 months from now. \
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I've been working nonstop for 10 years of my career. How can I best position and prepare myself for when I face interviews and need to somehow justify my break. \
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PS I do plan to study and do some side projects in the interim. Maybe even for some nonprofit. Just not a 40 hr grueling schedule, not ready for that yet. \
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Thanks for reading! 

Guidance needed : Taking a break and defending it in future job interviews

Mid-level engineers have very strong technical proficiency, able to execute on small to medium-sized projects with minimal hand-holding, leveling up from junior engineers.

Guidance needed : Taking a break and defending it in future job interviews

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