Referral Got Me The Job No Lie

The tech hiring process in its purest form! You've got the top candidate with a killer CV, relevant experience, excellent interviewing skills, pixel-perfect portfolio, and a Master's degree... then there's the person who got hired because they knew someone on the inside. No amount of fancy algorithms on your GitHub or perfectly normalized database designs can compete with the O(1) complexity of "my buddy Dave works there." The real system design interview is figuring out who to befriend at FAANG companies during college.