Consider using friends/people you’ve worked with to get past initial HR filters
Use feedback from interviews to figure out where you should improve
For the resume, I’d recommend hiring someone to help, since you can get direct feedback from people with recruiting/hiring experience in the field. I found the resume review service from levels.fyi to be useful, but I didn’t really shop around and I’m sure there’s plenty of other good ones. The important thing here is that you want to talk to someone who knows what a software engineer resume should look like.
Note that even if your resume isn’t very good, if you have someone who can vouch for you at a company, that will usually get you past the initial resume filter. You’ll still need to pass the rest of the interviews but it can be really helpful with big companies, and at smaller companies a reference might lower the bar for the rest of the interview process too.
For the interviewing/feedback piece, I’ve found that the biggest companies are generally pretty unhelpful (hope you like form rejection letters telling you to consider going to school or something), but I’d say most of the companies I’ve applied at that aren’t huge will give some sort of feedback. Sometimes it’s vague but still somewhat useful (“we don’t think your experience is a good match for this job”) and sometimes it’s surprisingly specific (Stripe gave me feedback on each of my interviews seperately, and told me exactly why they didn’t hire me).
I haven’t talked about leetcode questions much since if you’ve already done dozens of them, it’s probably not the weak point for you anyway. One thing to do here is that if you can technically do the questions, it’s worth also putting in some effort to do them as nicely as possible (simple code, non-wasteful performance, good variable/function names, etc.). Pretty much any professional software engineer should be able to review this for you since it’s the same as reviewing a pull request, and you could try the Code Review Stack Exchange too (although I think the average Stack Exchange users is relatively junior and they sometimes give strange advice).
I would recommend:
Get your resume in good shape
Apply to some places
Consider using friends/people you’ve worked with to get past initial HR filters
Use feedback from interviews to figure out where you should improve
For the resume, I’d recommend hiring someone to help, since you can get direct feedback from people with recruiting/hiring experience in the field. I found the resume review service from levels.fyi to be useful, but I didn’t really shop around and I’m sure there’s plenty of other good ones. The important thing here is that you want to talk to someone who knows what a software engineer resume should look like.
Note that even if your resume isn’t very good, if you have someone who can vouch for you at a company, that will usually get you past the initial resume filter. You’ll still need to pass the rest of the interviews but it can be really helpful with big companies, and at smaller companies a reference might lower the bar for the rest of the interview process too.
For the interviewing/feedback piece, I’ve found that the biggest companies are generally pretty unhelpful (hope you like form rejection letters telling you to consider going to school or something), but I’d say most of the companies I’ve applied at that aren’t huge will give some sort of feedback. Sometimes it’s vague but still somewhat useful (“we don’t think your experience is a good match for this job”) and sometimes it’s surprisingly specific (Stripe gave me feedback on each of my interviews seperately, and told me exactly why they didn’t hire me).
I haven’t talked about leetcode questions much since if you’ve already done dozens of them, it’s probably not the weak point for you anyway. One thing to do here is that if you can technically do the questions, it’s worth also putting in some effort to do them as nicely as possible (simple code, non-wasteful performance, good variable/function names, etc.). Pretty much any professional software engineer should be able to review this for you since it’s the same as reviewing a pull request, and you could try the Code Review Stack Exchange too (although I think the average Stack Exchange users is relatively junior and they sometimes give strange advice).
The resume review service from levels.fyi was very useful. Very much worth the price.