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Your credentials are great, but it sounds like you need to work on your interview skills, and not necessarily the technical side of things.

I've worked at three of the major league firms you list, and interviewed several hundred engineering candidates between them.

If I was to give one bit of advice, it would be to focus less on getting the perfect solution to their questions, but instead, talk through your thought process and explain why you're doing certain things and not others.

The most difficult interviews to evaluate are those where the candidate goes all quiet at the whiteboard, and then panics when they assess their own performance as poor.

I've recommended hiring plenty of people who were excellent communicators and logical thinkers, even though they didn't successfully answer the interview question, but they walked me through their thought process, and I could see that they're just getting tripped up on something.

Think about a handful of the coolest problems or bugs you've ever worked on and be able to explain why they're cool. Have a good understanding of common data structures (trees, tries, lists, hash maps, etc), and their big-O complexity. You've got to be pretty excited about something to get a PHd in it, so let that excitement come through in the interview.

Your communication and energy level, especially excitement about your chosen field, are as important as the technical questions.




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