My Recruiting Experience

Make of this what you will
November 21, 2025 by ben - [lore, startups]

Everything I know about recruiting as a college/startup person

How to recruit for software engineering jobs

My recruiting experience

I was going to pontificate on recruiting — my takes on what you should do, how you should recruit, how to get jobs; preaching from my little pedestal of prestigious positions — but my experience is already old. Is it outdated? I don’t know. We didn’t have good language models when I was in school. Computer Science was less hyped up with our class than the subsequent ones. And I wasn’t affected by the graduate program funding cuts & the consequences that had upon the job market. All this to say: who am I to dispense wisdom? What do I know?

IN HIGH SCHOOL I was exposed to more computer science than any child should be. We were spoiled for electives; my transcript includes titles like “VR Game Development,” “Functional Programming,” and “Advanced Programming Workshop.” The latter consisted mostly of me listening to my classmates discuss deficiencies in the Rust macro expansion system (that were preventing them from actualizing their teilhardian visions of god-from-machine-via-sufficiently-expressive-types). Those people remain to this day the most brilliant engineers I have met; to this day I have not been so awed anywhere else. I was not a CS kid at my school — the CS kids were Rust hackers, the CS kids were building automatic minecraft agents, the CS kids were working at NVidia, the CS kids were getting full-time job offers in high school. I wrote a little web app for our environmental economics class. I was not a CS kid, in my mind. But…

I ARRIVED AT UNIVERSITY with a much richer understanding of computer science than most first-years, and so I should let you know as much: I started on third base. Timing helped, too. When the pandemic struck, Brown pushed its incoming class from a Fall-Spring schedule to a Spring-Summer start — with one (1) Fall class to tide us over, free of charge. This had two effects. The first: my one free Fall class was the accelerated introductory CS course, which is an intensive course that replaces a typical two-course intro sequence. Because I took it in the Fall of 2020, I was free to spend every waking hour on the assignments (stuck as I was in the confines of my room). I think I spent no less than forty hours per week on that course.

The second consequence emerged later. I decided to skip the summer semester — mostly out of concern for my own mental health, but also because there’s not many worse ways to spend a summer than in an stifling pre-war Brown University dormitory. This altered my graduation timeline: I’d have three summers for internships, and I’d go into the first one with three semesters of coursework under my belt. Note that this wasn’t the point of my leave, and frankly it didn’t even occur to me until near graduation.

LET ME BE CLEAR: I didn’t orient my college experience around professional objectives, even if the results suggest as much. I didn’t prioritize internships, nor did I make any sort of special goal of them. I have forever been among high-achieving nerds, nerds who Go To “Good Schools” and Do Research and Get “Good Internships” and whatnot. These things come naturally, for better and worse; these things — internships, research, et cetera — are not remarkable.

One of those things was being a TA. This was one of the most consuming and rewarding experiences of my undergraduate experience. Most of my cerebral work in college was figuring out how to teach students & design assignments. The rest was hosting cocktail nights. I didn’t do much studying.

My first recruiting season went like this: it was the Fall, my second true semester; I’d finally arrived on campus after spending the summer abroad. I’d taken intro systems programming the semester prior along with three non-CS courses; now, I was taking Programming Languages and Theory of Computation alongside a course on Urban Antrhopology and an Introduction to Creative Nonfiction. I’d had some idea that I should probably apply for an internship or something, so I asked my friend Nick to help me prepare — he was in the year above me and very wise to these matters, and told me to not worry about the typical wisdom, seeing as I’d taken the accelerated intro CS course. No need to go through Cracking The Coding Interview, he said, nor to worry about Leetcode problems. Neither of those had excited me anyways, so I shrugged and gave neither a second thought.

I hoped my TA experience would carry me through my interviews — but after applying to about thirty-something places I had rejections from twenty-nine. Around Thanksgiving time I thought I’d blown it all, when out of nowhere my Meta (née Facebook) recruiter called: to my great surprise, I’d made it through my interviews. Would I like to join them for an internship in Menlo Park? And so I went. But before we go there, the lessons I took:

• forget leetcode,
• ignore interview prep, and
• get really lucky!

This is probably not great advice. I was well-set-up by my experience as a TA and the extra coursework I’d had. Remember that under more normal circumstances, applying for a first-summer internship means applying during one’s first one (or two) semesters — but with my timeline I’d already finished my introductory coursework before applying for jobs. I want to make something clear: I was not a grinder, and I wasn’t optimizing to accelerate anything. Anways, I think it’s much more important to be a good teammate than a technical weapon. I maintain that I was largely a personality hire. My vibes (if you are somehow unable to tell) are just so awesome and excellent. So are my interests. Moving on.

We — the Meta interns — were about halfway through the summer when we learned that we were unlikely to recieve return offers any time soon (due to Macroeconomic Conditions). Some interns chose to redouble their efforts to stand out, hopeful that they might be so excellent that they’d be asked back at the end of the summer. The rest of us started considering other options. A friend of mine, Paul, asked if I’d consider working at the firm he was interning at; he said it’d be fun and that I might like it. I said a recommendation from Paul is as good as any I could ask for, and so I went to Jump Trading.

Again, I didn’t really do any prep. I’d done some systems programming coursework (and TA’d the intro systems course, with Paul), so I was somewhat prepared to write C++; the rest, again, came down to treating it like office hours and Generally Being Affable and Curious. My route to Jane Street was similar — a referral from two good friends, plus some time pressure thanks to my Jump return offers — and everyone involved was excellent and accomodating and very willing to make offers happen. Special shoutouts to the recruiters at each of these companies for accelerating their processes and bending rules to get everyone over the finish line.

My commentary on my internship recruiting experiences is thus as follows.

1. I didn’t do much applying. I sent out probably fewer than 50 applications across all three seasons. Strong personal referrals — from people who knew me well — carried me to interviews.
2. And I didn’t do much interview prep — but TAing taught me how to frame problems and evaluate tradeoffs. All of computer science is framing problems and evaluating tradeoffs; the rest is storytelling.
3. Which, make no mistake, is just as important as the technical tasks. Storytelling is everything. You must tell the story in which you and your interviewer end up working together. Know who you are. Learn who they are.
4. Be kind, driven, and considerate.
5. Now I’m pontificating. I promised I wouldn’t do that. Back to reflecting:
6. The people I worked with were excellent through-and-through. My referrers were generous (much more generous than I’d ever dare ask for), my interviewers were engaged, and my recruiters went the extra mile to accomodate me and my timelines. I tried to be kind to them, and in return they were excellent to me.
7. Recruiting took up less than 10% of my mental energy. Maybe even less than 5%. I spent much more time on my classes.
8. Which is funny because I spent very little time on my classes, and much more time being preoccupied with teaching, dating, hosting, and generally getting up to mischief.
9. Now I will be normative: I think that’s how it should be. Live a good life, if you can afford to do so.

THIS MARKS THE END of my internship recruiting experience, and the end of my time recruiting at large companies. I knew I wasn’t going to go back to any of those three companies. (I have many friends who happily did, and who are still there to this day! They’re just not for me, for reasons I will share in-person.) But so I turned to look for toher options. I was in an incredibly fortunate position — fortunate throughout this entire process, really; my resume was pareto-optimal and I don’t take that lightly — and so it was not hard to get attention from recruiters at various firms in the trading world; I went through some processes, but my heart simply couldn’t be brought into it. I didn’t know exactly what I wanted, but I knew it wasn’t anything I’d seen yet.

Lost as I was, I reached out to my friends asking if they knew of any intersting startup jobs. I’d always been aware of my obligation to build something that’d make the world a better place, and I figured it might be time to reckon with the charge. This is when my website (yes, this website) suddenly became Actually Useful — founders would read my writing and find something (je-nais-se-quois) that they liked, which is so crucially important if you’re trying to work at a very early stage startup (i.e. <10 engineers). And, of course, referrals were very important, for the same reasons. Every startup is trying hard to only recruit people they deem Excellent, for fear of diluting their team’s efficacy; every startup must continuously recruit the Excellent, lest they fall stagnant. I mean, insatiable growth is fundemental to capitalism.

If you are recruiting for an early stage startup, you must understand the Excellence they’re looking for, and you must know how to tell the story of Your Excellence meeting Their Excellence and becoming the Most Excellent Team that the world has ever seen. Founders must carry conviction, independence, and ambition if they are to succeed; they will expect to see some of the same in you. They want you to be better than them, and they want to know that you have the self-assurance to find yourself and your stride in your own right.

Of course, don’t forget your kindness and your character — resist the temptation to emulate the vocal-but-unhelpful startupcore stereotypes. And some companies will just not like you, or you will just not like them. Interviewing is like dating; treat it as such. Many startups I spoke to didn’t like me, and I didn’t like many of them. So it goes.

If it helps, of the three that gave me offers, here are the reasons (beyond my interviews and referrals):

1. One liked my writing quite a lot. I think they also liked how seriously I took one of their interview games — I was optimizing a strategy for weeks after my interview, even after getting an offer — and that I taught them something New and Pertinent about research methods that was relevant for their product. They were very pleased. I was happy to see that what I’d learned in Psychological Assessment was useful here.
2. Another also liked my writing. They were taken with my depth of thinking about what I’d hope to do at their company, and that I’d very quickly grasped one of Wittgenstein’s critiques of certain moral questions. I’d very much enjoyed that conversation.
3. The third startup was less exposed to my words, but I think they were very taken with my analysis of certain tradeoffs and the way I was counting bytes. I also got on quite well with the team, and was able to match the CEO’s conversational pace. But that was true everywhere! That’s why they liked me.

I guess the general theme is demonstrating a surprising depth and breadth — obsession on all fronts, perhaps. And then it’s just a matter of being likable, kind, and quick. Quickness: all of these interview processes move quickly; I went from first interview to offer in a matter of days. It helped that I had created time pressure by lining up these processes together; this gave me a pretext for apologetic urgency, useful both in scheduling interviews and conducting negotiations. And I negotiated. Graciously, earnestly, and ambitiously — when you get one offer it’s much easier to get another; when you get a third, you can negotiate for as much as you want. Always, always graciously. Be excellent in your conduct and grateful for their time.

Do not try to fake breadth and depth, by the way. You’re much better off cultivating your passions. I recommend reading widely and creating artifacts — but to each their own. Be opinionated about the future and your place in it.

Or, like, do whatever. It’s not my place to tell you how to live your life. But I’m more than happy to be a sounding board!