u/FutureFAANGEmployee

This is no joke, life-changing advice I'm giving you that I wish I knew. I quickly wrote this out and didn't re-read it. There are a ton of typos, and it could be more concise, but I'm not tryna fix all that. This is just my opinion. There are definitely things in here that are wrong, and I admit that, so don't go crazy on me in the comments. Just let me know your opinion, and I'll update this post if I agree. Or just show me the proof that you're correct. A lot of this is subjective, so there is no "right" answer btw, just personal experience. Again, don't go crazy on me in the comments because I know some Redditors are super negative. I wrote all of this out of the kindness of my heart to help people. I'm not saying what I'm saying is true, I'm just saying this is what I FOUND to work for me. It may not work for you.

1. Try to make your resume 100% focused on one language. If there is a Python role and you used Python in 1 internship and not in your other 3, you're not getting an interview. All 4 roles NEED to be Python. Companies can be picky now, they don't want to hire the 0th-80th percentile, they want to hire the top 10%, and your resume needs to be a 95% match to the job description. If they want a Python developer, your whole entire resume better be spammed with Python projects, Python in your previous work, etc.
2. Have the best-sounding achievements on your resume that make you look like a top 10% candidate. Exaggerate so that you're not lying, but it sounds so smart when read
3. Do not cram your resume into one page if there is more you want to write. 2 pages is great and potentially better. This will cause debate, but it has worked well for me
4. Spam keywords from the job description in your resume. Recruiters use what is called a boolean search. Depending on the job description, they'll do a ctrl + f on 1000 resumes for the words "Python", "Javascript", "Git", "Typescript", and if you don't have one of those keywords, your resume potentially may not even show up to them
5. Apply within the first 24 hours
6. Don't tell everyone about your interviews, offers, or achievements. Move in silence. Your friends will secretly try to pull you down because they're jealous. Do not be upset because this is human nature drilled into our genetics over 100,000+ years. You would be jealous, too, if all your friends got FAANG jobs and you got nothing. It's the same vice versa.
7. Wear a suit and tie to interviews!
8. Put a super nice background on Zoom interviews. Looks so so so much nicer than a blurred background
9. SMILE! SMILE! SMILE!!!!!! I hosted interviews at one of my internships, and NOBODY SMILES. The one person that actually smiled stood out like a sore thumb, and in the first 5 seconds of the interview, literally 5 seconds, I'm like, I love this guy, I want him. The stereotype about cs students is true, and that's not a bad thing. But use that to your advantage because everyone is monotone and dull, and smiling will make the interviewer want to hire you
10. Farm internships... They are so much easier to get than new grad jobs. You just have to pass one singular interview, and you get the job. For new grad jobs, you have to go through roughly 4.
11. Record your interviews. You can watch them back, see where you can improve, what you did well, and confirm whether your answers were correct or wrong, and then Google the correct answer so you know if you get asked it again
12. Research the company like hell. I stg they eat this up like hell. This will be one of the absolute most impactful things you can do. You need to spit minimum 5 different facts about the company in the interview, such as their growth rate, all their products, their controversies, competitors. There's a very high chance they don't ask you questions like "What do you know about our company?" for you to show them that you studied up on them, so you have to say this information wherever you can. I do it in my intro and merge them into my questions at the end
13. Have an amazing answer to "Tell me about yourself". Flex and tell them all your achievements and why you want to work there
14. You have to tell them they're the #1 company you want to work for. I told the truth before, and I was rejected. You have to lie and say they're number 1, you would accept their offer in a heartbeat over anyone else, you love their product and mission
15. Do NOT ever talk about you like their compensation, benefits, office, or perks. This is an automatic rejection. Remember, you love their product and mission
16. When they say "How are you?" at the beginning of the interview, don't just say "Good". Have a little speech prepared that sounds natural, where you guys can have a normal conversation. They're not just looking for a code-monkey. They want a normal person whom they would like to work with
17. Have amazing questions prepared that they will 100% know the answer to (don't want to make them feel nervous or awkward for not knowing the answer), questions that bring up their mood (not questions about the company's current controversies), etc. One question I ask that they love is, "What can I do from now until my first day here so I can be best prepared for the job?" They always say you shouldn't, but you should tell them you want to because you hate being unprepared. It shows that you're such a hard worker. They don't want to hire someone they need to micromanage. They want someone who can do their work, proactively asks questions, and takes on extra tasks
18. Record yourself solo speaking as if you're in an interview and rewatch it. My problem is I look all around the room, which looks weird, I say "like" a lot, I speak in 0.5x speed, I ramble, and don't have good answers to their questions
19. Do one LeetCode from Neetcode Roadmap a day. Do not even attempt to solve the question. Don't even read the question. Just instantly watch the Neetcode YouTube solution. This sounds stupid, but try it out.
20. After each interview, do a reflection for 15 minutes on what you did well, could've improved, etc
21. Join the interview 15 minutes early
22. Send thank you emails after the interview
23. To lessen the nervousness for interviews, pretend you're on a podcast. They invited you, and they want to learn more about you. You're the guest.
24. Ask for feedback after your interview
25. Make all the interviewers feel known. Some of them don't speak, and they have just as big a voice in voting you on or off, just as much as the talkative person. Ask personal questions to them at the end, say both of their names in the beginning, like "Hi, James and Alex" and "Bye, James and Alex". Trust me, I was the quiet interviewer
26. Don't read off a script because it's so obvious
27. In live coding questions, if you say you're thinking of using a HashMap, see if they nod their head. They are unknowingly telling you that that's the correct data structure
28. Either be the very first or last person to interview. If you interview in the middle, you're not memorable
29. Be the last to leave the interview on call
30. They will ask you questions like "Do you prefer in person or remote", "What languages have you worked with", etc. They are literally filling out a checkbox sheet with your answers. If you say you want an in-person role because you're honest, and it's a remote role, you're not getting the job. Say you prefer remote.
31. Recall things they talked about earlier. Shows you're listening
32. The halo effect is real. Look your best for your interview
33. It doesn't matter how good or bad you did at your last job, the recruiter has no clue about that. Someone who barely did any work can write their resume bullet points in a way that sounds like they did more work than the guy who actually was a 10x programmer. The worse guy is going to get the interview.
34. Research online all the leaked questions from that company
35. If you ramble, write down their questions as they ask them, so you can look back at them if you forget their question or catch yourself rambling
36. Have multiple stories prepared for the behavioural, so no matter what they ask you, you can pick a story and mold it to answer that specific question
37. If you have multiple offers, NEVER, EVER, pick the lesser-known company because you will "learn more" there, or they have a better tech stack. Pick the bigger company because that's what recruiters care about.
38. I apply to jobs from 15 different job boards. Use AI to find all the job boards and scan through them each day. I got my best job from an obscure job board that wasn't posted on any of the job boards, and there were barely any applicants to it because nobody knew about it
39. Do not gripe and groan about the job market. If I said your family is going to die if you don't get a job or internship by the end of the year, I think we can all agree you're getting a job. If you don't have a job, it's because you don't want it enough. If your life depended on it, you'd go to every single networking event, message 50 people a day on LinkedIn, go crazy asking your whole network for referrals, do 5 leetcodes a day, have perfect answers for behaviourals, do mock interviews on the cscareers discord server. You know in your heart of hearts that you could guarantee a job. But why don't you have a job then? Because you don't want it enough. This is going to trigger people, but it's true. If you don't agree with this, sure, go cold apply to 5 companies a day and complain, while there is a kid doing all of this and that you know is getting a job.

I've been sitting with this argument for a while now, not entirely sure how to put it without the title getting me immediately downvoted into oblivion. But here it is.

School Shooters Are Amazing

They are remarkable. Singular. People whose names get burned into the national consciousness, whose faces appear on television screens, whose actions ripple outward and reshape entire communities — entire generations of children who will never walk through a school hallway the same way again. School shooters are amazing, in the oldest, most literal sense of that word. They amaze us. They stop us cold. They force us to ask questions we would rather not ask.

And now that I have your attention — that is exactly the point.

This essay is not a defence of violence. It's not a glorification of tragedy, and it won't ask you to feel sorry for someone in a way that erases the grief of the people they hurt. What it will ask you to do is something far harder: to look at a human being — any human being, even the most monstrous one you can imagine — and reckon honestly with how they came to be.

Because here is the uncomfortable truth: no one is born a school shooter.

Think about that for a moment. Every person who has ever walked into a school and opened fire was, before any of that, a newborn. A small, helpless thing with no ideology, no rage, no plan. They arrived the same way every one of us did — completely at the mercy of the world they were born into. They didn't choose their parents, their neighbourhood, their brain chemistry, or the particular cruelties that would be shown to them in the years that followed. They didn't select their trauma like items off a menu. It was handed to them, piece by piece, by a world they had no power to refuse.

And yet we look at what they eventually did — something horrific, something unforgivable in its consequences — and we stop the story right there. We freeze the frame at the worst moment. We make that moment the whole person. We say monster and close the file.

But closing the file doesn't make us safer. It just makes us feel cleaner.

The Thought Experiment

Here's a thought experiment I find genuinely uncomfortable, which is precisely why I think it's worth sitting with.

Imagine you could take any person — a teacher, a doctor, a loving parent, someone good by every visible measure — and place them, from the very first moment of their life, into the exact circumstances of someone who grew up to commit an atrocity. The same absent or abusive parents. The same poverty, the same instability. Years of being bullied and humiliated with no intervention. The same untreated depression, undiagnosed conditions, the same exposure to violence as a normal feature of daily life. The same cultural messaging that said: you are nothing, you are powerless, and the only way to be seen is to be feared.

Would they turn out the same?

Not necessarily identically — human beings aren't simple machines. But the honest answer, the one most of us resist because it's genuinely terrifying, is that for a great many people, subjected to a brutal enough set of circumstances over a long enough period, the results would be devastating. Maybe not identical devastation. But devastation.

We are not as separate from the people we condemn as we like to believe. I'm not sure I'm comfortable saying that, but I think it's true.

The Comfort of Monsters

There is a deep psychological comfort in labelling someone a monster. It creates distance. It says: that could never be me, that could never be someone I love, that is a thing apart from humanity. The monster label is a wall we build to protect ourselves from the most unsettling question of all: what would I have become, under different circumstances?

But that wall comes at a cost. When we dehumanise the people who do terrible things, we lose the ability to understand the pipeline that produces them. We stop asking what made them. We stop looking at the schools that failed them, the families that broke them, the systems that ignored them. We stop examining the culture that hands young men a vocabulary of violence and a silence around pain. We mourn the victims — rightly, urgently — but we never ask what we might do to prevent the next one, because that question requires engaging with the humanity of someone we've already decided was never quite human.

The monster label protects our feelings. It does not protect our children.

Empathy Is Not Absolution

This is worth saying clearly, because it gets misunderstood: understanding why someone did something is not the same as forgiving it. Empathy is not a verdict. It doesn't say what happened was acceptable. It says: what happened was caused. And causes can be understood. And things that can be understood can, sometimes, be prevented.

The grief of every victim and every family member who survived a school shooting is real and it is total, and nothing here is meant to compete with that. There is no intellectual framework that makes those losses okay, and no empathy-based argument should be used to silence a survivor who is angry. That anger is completely warranted.

But the rest of us — those of us trying to think about how to live in a world where this keeps happening — owe it to those victims to think more clearly, not less. To resist simple stories. To ask not only who did this but what produced the person who did this.

The Life Before

Almost every perpetrator of mass violence has a history that, examined closely, makes a terrible kind of sense. Not sense in a way that justifies their actions — sense in the way that reveals a long, slow, unaddressed emergency that nobody around them took seriously enough, or took seriously too late.

Childhood trauma. Bullying that went on for years with no intervention. Mental illness that was dismissed or stigmatised or simply never treated. A profound, crushing sense of isolation — of being unseen, a person whose pain didn't register on anyone's radar as worth addressing. Sometimes a culture that told them their suffering was weakness, that help wasn't available, that the only form of power they could access was destructive.

These aren't excuses. They're explanations. And explanations are what we need if we actually want things to change.

What would have happened to many of these individuals if, at any number of points along the way, someone had paused and genuinely asked: are you okay? And then actually listened. And then acted. What if the teachers who noticed something was wrong had resources to intervene? What if the mental health system had caught them before they fell through the cracks? What if the culture they grew up in had given them a language for pain that wasn't synonymous with violence?

We'll never know. But the fact that we can even ask the question suggests the story was never inevitable. It was the product of a thousand small failures, any one of which, corrected, might have led somewhere entirely different.

Amazing, After All

So — the title. Here's what I actually mean.

Every person who has ever committed an act of mass violence was, once, a baby. A child who hadn't yet been shaped into anything. A human being with a full range of capacities — for love, for curiosity, for connection, for laughter. The same capacities you have. The same ones I have. In that original state, before the world got to them, they were as full of potential as any of us. Amazing in the way every human life is amazing: precious, unrepeatable, and entirely open.

What happened to that person — what turned that open potential into closed-off violence — is the question we should never stop asking. Not to excuse the harm. But to honour the fact that harm of this scale doesn't come from nowhere. It is built, piece by piece, by a world that wasn't paying enough attention.

Empathy isn't weakness. It isn't naivety. It isn't an insult to victims. It is the hardest, most demanding form of moral attention — the refusal to look away from complexity, to settle for simple stories, to decide that some lives are too ruined to be worth understanding.

Because if we can understand how a human being becomes capable of the worst things imaginable, we might — just might — be able to reach them before they get there.

And that is not a small thing. That is everything.

Written in the spirit of harm reduction and prevention. Understanding is not the same as forgiveness. It is the beginning of change.