I had several calls and exchanged messages with Yonatan for a couple of months last year while I was searching for a new job. I would strongly recommend his services. I’ve been programming for ~5 years now, although I wouldn’t consider some of those years to be particularly high quality experience.
The calls felt a little like “career therapy”. Yonatan tended to answer a lot of my questions with questions of his own, in order to help me draw my own conclusions. He was perceptive and particularly good at pointing out irrational thoughts I had around my career—it turned out there was a lot more of these than I was expecting!
Estimating counterfactual impact is obviously hard, but I’m going to try anyway.
I ended up getting a FAANG job, which I estimate will reduce my time to getting a highly impactful job by 18-24 months compared to offers from good-but-not-FAANG companies.
I have slightly greater counterfactual earning-to-give potential, but I think it’s negligible.
I don’t have a reasonable estimate of how likely it was to get to interview stage for FAANG companies, so I can’t comment on how impactful Yonatan was in helping me land interviews in the first place (I suspect his CV review probably added a few % points, but <10)
Without speaking to Yonatan, I would’ve applied for fewer jobs, done fewer interviews, been less prepared for them, and got less proficient in the process of doing them. Contingent on my getting a FAANG interview, my counterfactual estimate would be that I had a 10% chance of success, with Yonatan’s help I think I was ~40% ex ante.
If we use the (poor) assumption that I was always going to at least get the interview, I estimate Yonatan’s coaching added an extra 6-7 months of direct work to my career. If his help increased the chances of getting an interview in the first place, then the impact is higher.
My biggest takeaways from his coaching:
Have a low bar for applying to jobs, apply for lots of them, filter once you have more information about them. This helps you get better at interviews and allows you to compare potential offers against one another.
Only write a cover letter if the job is significantly higher value than others, otherwise cover letters are likely a poor spend of your time (apply for more jobs in the time you would’ve spent writing them).
Apply early, see what parts of the interview process you get rejected at, and work on that part. Don’t assume you need to grind LeetCode for 6 months before you can apply anywhere—maybe you’re already great at LeetCode but suck at other things.
If you think “I would really like this job. I want to wait 3 months before applying to maximise my chances of success”, email them and ask how before you can reapply in the event that you fail. Same goes for various other questions you might have—ask the company rather than not applying.
If you are applying for jobs with the purpose of gaining career capital, ask about whether there is structured mentorship available. I found this question particularly valuable in interviews, and was surprised by the amount of times I got a long, convoluted answer that amounted to “no”. If you are trying to improve, you want short feedback loops, and many companies don’t have these in place.
I had several calls and exchanged messages with Yonatan for a couple of months last year while I was searching for a new job. I would strongly recommend his services. I’ve been programming for ~5 years now, although I wouldn’t consider some of those years to be particularly high quality experience.
The calls felt a little like “career therapy”. Yonatan tended to answer a lot of my questions with questions of his own, in order to help me draw my own conclusions. He was perceptive and particularly good at pointing out irrational thoughts I had around my career—it turned out there was a lot more of these than I was expecting!
Estimating counterfactual impact is obviously hard, but I’m going to try anyway.
I ended up getting a FAANG job, which I estimate will reduce my time to getting a highly impactful job by 18-24 months compared to offers from good-but-not-FAANG companies.
I have slightly greater counterfactual earning-to-give potential, but I think it’s negligible.
I don’t have a reasonable estimate of how likely it was to get to interview stage for FAANG companies, so I can’t comment on how impactful Yonatan was in helping me land interviews in the first place (I suspect his CV review probably added a few % points, but <10)
Without speaking to Yonatan, I would’ve applied for fewer jobs, done fewer interviews, been less prepared for them, and got less proficient in the process of doing them. Contingent on my getting a FAANG interview, my counterfactual estimate would be that I had a 10% chance of success, with Yonatan’s help I think I was ~40% ex ante.
If we use the (poor) assumption that I was always going to at least get the interview, I estimate Yonatan’s coaching added an extra 6-7 months of direct work to my career. If his help increased the chances of getting an interview in the first place, then the impact is higher.
My biggest takeaways from his coaching:
Have a low bar for applying to jobs, apply for lots of them, filter once you have more information about them. This helps you get better at interviews and allows you to compare potential offers against one another.
Only write a cover letter if the job is significantly higher value than others, otherwise cover letters are likely a poor spend of your time (apply for more jobs in the time you would’ve spent writing them).
Apply early, see what parts of the interview process you get rejected at, and work on that part. Don’t assume you need to grind LeetCode for 6 months before you can apply anywhere—maybe you’re already great at LeetCode but suck at other things.
If you think “I would really like this job. I want to wait 3 months before applying to maximise my chances of success”, email them and ask how before you can reapply in the event that you fail. Same goes for various other questions you might have—ask the company rather than not applying.
If you are applying for jobs with the purpose of gaining career capital, ask about whether there is structured mentorship available. I found this question particularly valuable in interviews, and was surprised by the amount of times I got a long, convoluted answer that amounted to “no”. If you are trying to improve, you want short feedback loops, and many companies don’t have these in place.