> One of the best pieces of advice I received in life was this: don't sell yourself short. Try, strive, and then let other people reject you. But never reject yourself. And if others reject you, stand up and try again. If they hit you harder, then get up quicker and hit back harder.

This is great advice and it's been how I live my life, and it's revealed so many opportunities to me that I never thought I would have.

With these big 4 and unicorn onsites, though, that attitude didn't reveal new opportunities to me. It confirmed all of my worst suspicions about how people behave and how big tech companies operate. People actually are going to discriminate against me. These big companies actually are a socioeconomic monoculture. The circumstances of my birth actually will cause people to deny me opportunities regardless of how hard I work to prove them wrong. There actually is a glass ceiling.

I guess I had to get here eventually. It just feels terrible. I spent 8 months preparing for these interviews while working full-time, I aced Facebook and Instacart, aced 4/5 at Google, and got 5 rejections and 0 offers.

The engineer I ate lunch with at Facebook went to a top school. He literally told me that when he interviewed for his internship, he was asked only 1 coding question. It was Three Sum, which is a very well-known and easy question. That got him inside and he converted it to a full-time offer.

Why does he get in based on 1 easy question, but I get asked ~7 algorithms questions, write asymptotically perfect solutions to all of them, and get rejected?

The most frustrating thing about this is all the sacrifices I make in life preparing for this and trying to break through, despite truly not knowing whether it's even possible for me to get accepted by these people.

If they are discriminating, they don't say "we're literally never going to hire you and it's for reasons you can't ever change, so you're free to give up." I would feel better about that because at least I would get my evenings and weekends back. But they would never say that, they'll just keep encouraging me to sacrifice all my evenings and weekends for the rest of my life until I give up and blame myself.

So I'll never receive any signal for when I should stop. I'm just perpetually stuck in this mode of having my entire personal life on hold trying to get into companies that simply don't hire people like me regardless of technical performance or merit.

I've spent 30 unpaid hours per week over the last 8 months studying for this and I have nothing to show for it. It's not like knowing how to invert a binary tree on a whiteboard is transferrable and benefits me elsewhere in life, this is completely trivial and useless knowledge for me. It's not worth anything to me anymore, it's a thousand hours of unpaid overtime devoted to passing technical interviews that I then pass and still get rejected anyway.

And I honestly don't know what else to do now other than to continue giving unpaid 30-hour weeks to Google and Facebook's recruiting processes. What else am I supposed to do? That's where all the advancement is, what else is there for me to do?? Am I supposed to just accept my lot in life like a pauper in feudal Europe? Where is there any happiness to be found in just accepting this?