Are you a programming enthusiast?
Do you want to work at a top technology company?
Do you have strong computer science fundamentals?
If your answer is yes to all of these questions, then you are at the right place. DevPaths, run in partnership with Sabanci University, is here to help you be ready for your technical interview and achieve your goals!
I love the idea, tell me more! What’s this about?
Just to summarize in a couple of sentences: We are holding weekly sessions and these sessions will have a lot of mock interviews structured around algorithms, data structures, design questions in addition to resume screening and behavioral questions.
All of the participants who have shown enough progress will have chance to network with engineers from Google, Facebook, Palantir, Microsoft, Uber, Salesforce and many other respected tech companies, and get a referral.
Does this sound too good to be true? Take a look at how much work we put it in so far to help our participants reach their goals:
Which companies did our alumni get offers from?
If you want to know more about our alumni, every week we will be sharing a story of one of our alumni here. Make sure to follow us on social media not to miss stories behind these numbers!
OUR DEVPATHS ALUMNI RECEIVED OFFERS FROM :
This sounds great so far, what’s the catch?
We expect you to attend 2 to 4 hour sessions every week. Unless you have a very serious excuse, you need to attend all of these sessions. Homework assignments, exam preparations do not count as valid and serious excuses. In addition to that, you should practice on your own at least 7-8 hours every week. We will send you some guiding questions as well, but you will be evaluated based on the improvement on your performance, not by how many questions you solve.
You would also be expected to watch a series of videos where we chat with engineers from Silicon Valley companies about the culture of these companies and tips on how to prepare for the technical interviews.
Last but not least, you would be expected to give back to your community once you find an internship or a job. This can be in the form of mentorship or financial support. We will not be enforcing this in anyway, but we encourage everyone to think about giving back to their communities from day one.
Our goal is to help you crack the coding interviews and get your dream internship/job at a top-tier technology company.
Software engineering is the fastest growing occupation in US (expected to grow 26% from 2018 to 2028, much faster than the average of any other occupation based on the data provided by US Bureau of Labor Statistics). The number of employees in the big tech companies increased at a much higher rate in the last 3 years (from 2016 to 2019, Microsoft: 114k → 144k, Google: 72k → 103k, Facebook: 17k → 35k based on the data provided by www.statista.com) However, the number of college graduates who hold a CS degree is not keeping up with this rate, and therefore for almost all of the big tech companies in the Silicon Valley, hiring is one of the top goals. We believe, with the right guidance there is a huge potential in Turkey to meet part of this constantly growing demand in software engineering talent.
Devpaths pilot program started with around 10 participants in August 2018. After a successful pilot program, we started the official program in January 2019. Since then more than 37 participants were able to get job or internship offers.
We try to help motivated prospective software engineers succeed in software engineering interview process. We guide participants in analyzing a problem into sub-problems, detecting edge-cases, finding an effective solution, writing a concise implementation of their solution and communicating their thoughts.
We do not run a coding camp or a study group. We encourage all the participants to help each other and learn together, but the core of the program is to help the participants prepare for the interviews, not to teach them Computer Science.
All of the sessions are online.
Anyone who has a good understanding of Computer Science basics, Data Structures, Algorithms and is ready to work hard for the next couple of quarters can participate.
We have an 18-week curriculum, which begins with resume preparation and covers behavioral interviews, coding interviews, data structure / algorithm interviews, system design interviews. In addition, we discuss how to effectively communicate your approach, how to write readable, clean code, how to be proactive during the interviews and how to lead the discussion. When you feel you are ready, you can apply to be part of the active group. When you apply to the active group, you get interviewed in front of everyone, and the class makes a collective decision on whether you are ready for the actual interviews or not. If the class thinks you are ready, then you are interviewed by the current active members. When you pass both of these interviews, you join the active group.
We are leveraging Sabancı University alumni network to provide you with a more structured and extensive referral opportunities.
We are also holding in-person workshops and summits in the Sabancı University campus. You can learn more about first workshop we held in July 2019 here, and the first summit we held in December 22, 2019 here.
Our Evaluation Criteria
In this section, you can find how we select applicants to be a participant at DevPaths. Below are our core criteria while we evaluate all or the information we collected during your application period.
– Your performance, results, in the placement test (which you will receive upon your application) will be used as one of the highest indicatives of your computer science fundamentals and problem solving skills.
– Having a solid cs fundamentals is a must. Your grades in data structures and algorithm courses will be taken into consideration.
– Although it is not the only source of your performance and educational achievements your university and cumulative gpa are also considered.
– Positions and activities in which you demonstrate leadership skills are also a plus.
– Having volunteer experience is one of the important things we look for in our applicants as well.
If you think that with the above criteria your application may not stand out. Here are some other ways you can show your skills:
– Having a high ranking in programming competitions or hackathons
– Leetcode performance e.g. successful submissions
Also, you may want to review our evaluation criteria for applications If you cannot find an answer to your questions please feel free to reach us at [email protected].
DevPaths
