From the Archives asked
answered May 11
I really enjoy your seminar so far. I've learned a lot about navigating SWE through a career lens and how important dealing with people is to your career opportunities.
Not sure if you remember, but I wrote my blank space submission about my experience of going through the YC W26 batch, and the decision to leave my startup to re-enter school. The experience made me realize that I'm much more energized by deeply technical database and distributed systems work than by scaling a company I'm not personally passionate about.
Right now I'm trying to think carefully about how to position myself so that I can spend the early years of my career working on hard systems problems while learning from more senior engineers.
I'd be curious to hear your perspective on how I should approach breaking into these kinds of environments intentionally instead of just optimizing for prestige/compensation.
Philip's answer
It's great you have a strong vision for what you want to do next. It makes decision-making and prioritization much easier.
The best things to position you well for the type of systems work you want to do depends on which year you'll graduate. If you have more than one summer internship opportunity left, the best strategy is to make sure each year's internship builds into the next year's (i.e. build good work experience into increasingly elite backend opportunities). If, however, you have one or less internships left, then the remaining opportunities are around being strong enough in grades and interesting project experiences in order to secure an initial screening interview for the best teams. How are your interviewing skills? If you haven't done so yet, I'd recommend reading my article on how I got an OpenAI job <https://molochinations.substack.com/p/how-i-got-a-job-at-openai> as a foundation for the amount of investment I think people should make toward doing well at interviews.
Work in the best teams that will accept you. Your goal in the first few years of professional work should be to build a solid foundation for your mid-career. Remember also that small successes build into big successes.
Wishing you all the best!