For me, the money quotes was probably the <i>least</i> interesting (other than the take-away that a ~100k salary is probably a fair target for software engineering). The idea of someone only having a rough idea of what software-engineering is (1 year of self-study, more or less) can get an interview at Google at all was far more interesting. Also the fact that pretty much all the companies were absolutely hopeless at evaluating candidates - they might as well ignore resumes and only go direct references, for all their &quot;great hiring process&quot; (this includes Google, apparently).<p>&gt; From no experience to teaching web dev at a bootcamp after three months? one year later offered roles by Google and Airbnb for $250k a year? Is this truly possible?<p>I think the real take-away is that if you can pry open the door, intelligence will always make you an attractive candidate. Especially if you also have the drive to complete projects. Note that this guy went pro poker player at 16, and was in the top tier at 18 -- essentially self-taught.<p>It does seem that the interview process for pretty much everyone in Silicon Valley is hopelessly broken, though. I wish he included some concrete examples about the kind of questions he got, especially the ones he thought were hard. With the little detail in the post, it&#x27;s hard to tell if it&#x27;s &quot;implement a linked list, and show some examples of how one could sort it.&quot; or if it&#x27;s something less trivial. And not to mention how&#x2F;why the problems&#x2F;questions were asked: was it to see <i>if</i> the candidate could solve the problem, or to see <i>how</i> the candidate approached the problem -- with less emphasis on the outcome?<p>I think it sounds ridiculous to &quot;prep&quot; for a job interview. It kind of implies that the interview is broken -- after all you could learn something significant about a position in a week of prep-time, almost anyone should be able to fill that position...<p>Some previous discussion here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11552780" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11552780</a>