I'm just explaining what worked for me- I'm in Raleigh NC, so there were no FANGs here a year and half ago when I was in the market. But I did secure offers at

I'm just explaining what worked for me- I'm in Raleigh NC, so there were no FANGs here a year and half ago when I was in the market. But I did secure offers at the two biggest tech companies in the area, IBM and Cisco. I had no open source contributions, no hack-a-thons, and no side projects with users. No experience or internships whatsoever, I had work experience in the service industry that I didn't put on my resume. GPA barely above a 3 All I had were side projects on github, listed prominently on my resume, that showcased skills. My side projects were all toy projects- things like a tiny Go API with a dockerfile and Kubernetes YAMLs, an arduino project that creates a CSV based on inputs from a GPS sensor, etc. When my interviews went well, it was because I had demonstrable expertise in Kubernetes