Visual Summary / DVFZ Books
Big tech hires for fit, and fit is something you can prepare
How six of the largest technology companies actually hired in 2022, from choosing a department to answering the offer letter.
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01 The frame
These companies hire for fit, and fit has two halves
Pocholo Peraza starts from an assumption that most job hunting advice skips: nearly everyone who reaches an interview at Microsoft, Meta, Apple, Amazon, Netflix or Google can do the work. What separates them is whether their skills land in a niche the company actually needs, and whether the way they work matches the way that company runs.
The book treats those two halves as equally decisive. Skills and experience, it argues, combine into characteristics that let a person "fit into a particular company culture or be repelled by it." So the cost of getting it wrong is not only a rejection. It can be a job you get and then leave.
One caution before you use any of this. The book was published in 2022 and describes six named companies as they hired then, in the period when the pandemic had just pushed interviews onto video. Every specific stage, tool and timeline below is the book's account of 2022, reported here as the book gives it. Check the current process on each company's own careers pages before you rely on it.
A bad culture fit could result in frustration or disappointment that could lead to an early exit, with you having wasted your time and perhaps trying to salvage your reputation in the process. Getting Your Dream Job in Big Tech Companies, chapter 1
Pick one company you want. Write two short columns: what you can already do that they hire for, and how they work day to day. If the second column is empty, you have researched half the job.
02 Choose the work
Pick the department before you pick the company
The first job most people picture at these companies is writing code. Peraza spends his second chapter arguing that this is the narrowest door in a very wide building, and that choosing the wrong door is the most common way to fail before you have even applied.
He walks through the org charts. Microsoft's work sits in five business segments, supported by people in sales, marketing, human resources, localisation, finance, credit and collections, vendor management, engineering, order processing and logistics. Meta lists departments for global affairs, finance, operations, product, technology, business and legal. Apple's careers list runs from information security and global security all the way to dining and food services, where executive chefs and line cooks appear on the same page as back-end engineers.
Two routes lead in, and the book treats them differently. Recruited from college, you join a global cohort that is shown the organisation at local and global level, and staying on that track for several years puts you, in the book's words, "on the fast track to management." Arriving mid-career, your resume has to prove the same breadth: initiative, creativity, an affinity for information technology, and experience of an environment like the one you are applying into.
Open one company's careers site and read the department list rather than the job list. Name the department you would join, and the one function inside it that your last three years genuinely prepared you for.
03 Read the culture
The perks are evidence, not the prize
The longest chapter in the book is about company culture, and it opens by rereading the famous benefits as information rather than reward. Jeans and late start times are real, Peraza says, and so is the overtime as a release date approaches.
Google's sleeping pods get envied. He reads them as "reflective of a very driven culture where people are willing to take a nap to continue working on a project at a later time of the day rather than leaving the office to go home." Gyms, shops and dentists on site tell the same story: the culture "becomes a part of who the individual is rather than something that a person puts on for a few hours a day." That is worth knowing before you apply, not after.
Then the differences. Netflix is the book's clearest example of a culture that is really an operating procedure. Employees are named informed captains in their own area and decide with minimal management. Anyone who disagrees is expected to say so clearly, in writing and in person. If the data changes the decision, it changes. If it does not, "it is expected that the decision will be accepted and embraced across the board." There are no set vacation days and no parental leave policy, only an expectation that vacations get taken.
The vacation policy is that vacations need to be taken. Getting Your Dream Job in Big Tech Companies, chapter 3
Find one published statement from your target company about how it works, not what it believes. Then find one moment in your own career when you already worked that way, and write it down as a story you can tell out loud.
04 The resume
Write the resume as a story, then lay it out for a skim
Peraza's instruction is unusual and useful: build the resume as though you were telling a story about yourself in the third person. Open with a brief overview, dwell on the highlights of your career, then supply the background that explains how you got there, then close by saying how to reach you. Those four story beats are the four sections of the page.
Then he hands the page to two readers who want completely different things. The first is automatic, so the book tells you to take wording and linguistic style from the job posting itself so the resume survives "any preliminary automatic sorting processes." The second is a recruiter, and the book cites a 2018 Ladders study putting the average skim at 7.4 seconds before a resume moves on or is discarded.
What survives 7.4 seconds is layout, and one ordering rule most people get backwards. List the most relevant experience first, because "relevance to the role is more important than a chronologically correct resume." Describe accomplishments, not duties. Two pages maximum, titles in bold, bullets written as short declarations.
Employers should be able to see that the return on investment for hiring you is higher than the salary you are asking for. Isaiah Hankel, quoted in chapter 4
Give your own resume eight seconds and note only what you actually read in that time. Anything that did not register in eight seconds is not doing any work. Move your strongest evidence up until it does.
05 The answer
One answer shape serves all three kinds of question
The interview chapter names three question types and then gives you a single structure that handles all of them. Behavioural questions ask how you would perform an action, testing whether you know the subject. Situational questions draw on something a colleague really faced and compare your answer to how it was actually resolved. Technical questions test the skill directly, and usually lead to a practical test later.
The structure is STAR: situation, task, action, result. Set the scene with the organisation, the period and your role, and say what not solving the problem would have cost. State the task and the constraints, of time or resources, that made it hard. Then the action, which the book calls the part interviewers most want, because it shows your method and how you brought other people in. Then the result, quantified in time or money wherever you can.
Garima Shrivastava, an Amazon business operations analyst quoted in the book, adds one habit that applies to all three: listen carefully and ask for clarification when you are unsure, so that you answer the question you were actually asked. The book also notes that Microsoft has asked candidates questions well outside technology, such as why manhole covers are round, to see whether they can reason in the open.
Share how skills you have gained throughout your career will translate to the role for which you are interviewing. Microsoft careers site, quoted in chapter 5
Take the three achievements you are proudest of on your resume and write each one out as situation, task, action and result. Put a real number in every result, even a rough one.
06 The test
The technical test is where the six companies stop looking alike
Everything up to this point is broadly shared. Chapter six is where each company runs its own machine, and the differences are worth knowing before you decide where to spend your preparation. The chapter's own blunt rule for the resume you submitted is to know what you say you know.
The common ground first. Data structures and algorithms are tested everywhere, whatever language you write in: arrays, graphs, hash maps, heaps, lists, queues, searches, sorts, stacks, traversals and trees, plus the ability to write basic algorithms using iteration and recursion. The book names Leetcode as one platform for practising these, and tells the story of Vohid Karimov, who used it extensively before accepting a software engineering post at Google.
Then the shapes diverge, as the book describes them in 2022. At Meta a technical screen gives you five minutes to introduce yourself, two coding problems in thirty-five minutes, and five minutes for your own questions; the full interview runs several hours and includes a design interview. Amazon tests first with an online coding test taken at home, then brings you on site, where you may meet up to seven employees and may be asked to write a memo.
Netflix hires engineers only once they have at least three years of experience, and may set a project task to complete in one working day. Google's assessments are role-specific rather than a single funnel, and the book says the whole process can run to seven interviews over two and a half months.
Choose one company and prepare for its shape rather than for interviews in general. If it is Meta, sit down with a timer and solve two problems in thirty-five minutes. If it is Amazon, write a one-page memo about a project you led.
07 The offer
An offer is a decision about a stage of your career, not just a number
The last two chapters split the offer into two separate judgements: what you do with the letter, and whether the job matches where you actually are in your working life.
Three responses, the book says: accept, negotiate or decline. Do not resign anywhere until you have a written offer and have accepted it in writing. Check whether the letter has an expiry date, and ask what background checks are still to come, so that nothing surprises you after you have said yes.
Even when you are delighted, take a day or two, then telephone, then follow the call with a written acceptance letter. The offer and your letter together are what you can rely on if your contact person disappears. On money, Peraza cites Moonchaser, a firm that helps candidates negotiate offers at these companies, for the position that you should always negotiate, even when an offer is presented as nonnegotiable. Ask slightly above what you want so there is room to settle, and avoid handing over your salary history, which can be used to cap you.
Then the second judgement. Drawing on Gary Burnison, the book names six career stages: follower, collaborator, instructor, manager, influencer and leader. Each one asks for different behaviour. Taking a job that belongs to a stage you have not reached, or one you have already outgrown, is the book's recipe for frustration on both sides, and it warns that the reviews and the short stay both follow you afterwards.
Before you reply to any offer, name your career stage in the book's terms and hold the job description against it. Then read the letter once more, this time only for its expiry date and its outstanding background checks.
08 The whole book
Eight chapters, one sequence you can work through
The book does not promise you a job at any of these companies. It promises something more useful: that almost every step between wanting one and getting one is a step you can prepare for in advance.
Fit
Six companies, far more departments than you expected, and six different cultures. Choose all three before you apply, because a bad culture fit costs more than a rejection does.
Evidence
A resume built for a keyword filter and a 7.4 second skim, answers shaped as situation, task, action and result, and a technical test whose shape you already know.
Judgment
Read the offer for its expiry date and its outstanding checks, negotiate anyway, and hold the role against the career stage you are honestly at.
Peraza's advice for a rejection is the plainest thing in the book: ask what was missing, then go and get it. Every stage described here is one you are allowed to come back to.
Adapted from Getting Your Dream Job in Big Tech Companies: Practical Tips and Trade Secrets for the Big Tech Jobseekers
Pocholo Peraza · © 2022 DVFZ Training Consultancy Services · 73 cited sources in the source edition