Will I get a software engineering job within 3 months?

May 28, 2024

You can also see this question on Manifold. Resolves YES if I receive an offer for a full-time job doing software engineering, ML engineering, and/or research engineering by September 1, 2024. Resolves NO if I do not receive an offer for a full-time job doing software engineering, ML engineering, and/or research engineering by September 1, 2024.

My plan for the next 3 months

Edit (2024/08/27): I resolved the Manifold question as NO and provided more information in a comment here. In summary, I’ve been struggling with mental health issues like grief, depression, anxiety, and ADHD. These issues in tandem with the pressure of searching for jobs caused me to burnout. I am currently doing weekly sessions of therapy to understand and work through these obstacles.

Edit (2024/05/30): Based on feedback from my question on Manifold, I am updating my plan to be less ambitious and less broad. This means focusing on only a few projects and some simple contributions to well-known projects. Projects and contributions will be more “systems” flavored instead of “algorithms” flavored, focusing on GPU programming, model optimization, and MLOps. I will start networking now, start applying in 2 weeks, and start interviewing whenever I get interviews. Interview preparation will start now and continue for 3 months.

Here is my rough plan. Max out connection requests on LinkedIn every week and apply to 20-30 jobs every day. Make open source contributions to projects like PyTorch AO, OpenAI Triton, PyTorch XLA. Build personal projects in GPU kernel benchmarking, model quantization and pruning, and parallelized training. Prepare for software engineering interviews using Leetcode, Grokking, EPI, and mock assessments. Skim system design interview preparation since it is not necessary for new grad/entry-level roles.