Life on Hard Mode # 2 - How to Get into Big Tech

There is a saying: “Don’t be afraid of the man who can do 10,000 different karate moves. Be afraid of the person who has done the same move 10,000 times.” From 2016 to the present, I’ve probably interviewed at hundreds, if not thousands, of companies. I also interviewed quite a few folks, too. But I started pretty modestly. Here are my lowlights from college, for example:

* 4 rejections from Google for internships and jobs (2016-2019)

* Multiple failed final stage interviews at companies like Meta, Databricks, Microsoft, NVIDIA (I would have been filthy rich by now if I got that offer in 2020), etc.

* Well over 3000 applications over the course of college

* Rescinded internship offer during the summer of COVID

What qualifies me is the plethora of experience I’ve accumulated. A lot of understanding of the fundamentals and how hiring practices are conducted in big tech and at my company, Anthromind. Even though the underlying technology changes (e.g., more agentic frameworks, prompt engineering, GDPO, or PPO), the core methods of hiring and evaluating candidates remain the same. Since so many people asked about getting job offers, and in today’s market, it is brutally difficult, here is my no-BS guide.

Friday Positivity!

Today’s positivity piece is “showing up is half the work.”

Topic of the week: How to get into Big Tech

In today’s podcast, I cover everything from my background before Google to my technical preparation, personal development, interview prep, and more. Talk about the main things that big companies look for:

* Strong fundamentals

* Ability to break down problems

* Clear communication

* X-factor or culture fit

Finally, since the job market in 2025 is so different from even two years ago, I have my own principles on what I would do differently. As I am recruiting, I look for this myself. Hence, I think I have a good grasp of it.

Resources:

* A resume teardown

* A complete hiring rubric guide

* A worksheet to develop your “stories” from experiences that fit into any behavioral question pattern

* A step-by-step checklist for the entire process from first application to post offer

* A form where you can submit your resume for feedback

To access them all, go to this Google Drive link. And the anonymous resume feedback form is here: https://forms.gle/x1tXLagYvE5agA1v5 (Please provide a URL. There is no upload feature.)

P.S. What have I been reading/watching/playing?

* [Paper] MiroThinker: Pushing the performance boundaries of open-source research agents via model, context, and interactive scaling: this is a fascinating paper about how a model itself can be scaled internally vs. by increasing the model size or context length

* [Paper] Generalist foundational models are not clinical enough for hospital operations: This paper shines a light on what we are seeing daily at Anthromind. For example, companies, primarily in the clinical space, using base or even “healthcare” pre-trained models are not seeing the results that they want. In fact, the results are horrendous. Proper post-training is so necessary for clinical operations.

* [Podcast] RL is even more information-inefficient than you thought: This is the most recent issue of the Dwarkesh podcast. And in this one, Dwarkesh talks about the jagged nature of RL and the true cost inefficiencies. Very fascinating stuff.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit pratikkarki.substack.com