How a Recent Grad Got Hired in a Brutal Tech Market
From Develop Yourself by Brian Jenney
June 8, 2026 · 31 min
About this episode
Salil Monga shares his journey of landing a job in a tough tech market through networking and strategic thinking.
Connect with Salil here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/salil-monga/ If you're trying to make the jump into AI engineering, join Parsity: https://parsity.io/ai-dev Salil Monga had a 4.0 GPA, applied to over 1,000 jobs, and landed three interviews. Not one of the jobs he actually got came from those applications. I sat down with Salil, now CTO of Cupe Connect, to dig into how you actually get hired in a difficult market: warm connections over cold applications, fundamentals over chasing the "golden stack," and why he walked into an interview thinking JavaScript was Java and still walked out with the offer. What we get into: - The 1,000-applications, 3-interviews reality, and why the applications were the wrong game to begin with - How every job he landed came from a professor or a peer, not a job board - Getting emotionally wrecked by applications, and the strategic mindset that fixes it - Using AI to actually learn instead of copy-pasting answers, and how he taught students to do the same - Why there's no golden stack, and how he shipped an iOS app having never built one before - Why fundamentals and problem-solving beat the framework of the month - How LeetCode quietly…
People in this episode
Host: Brian Jenney
Guest: Salil Monga
Topics covered
- job applications
- AI engineering
- interview strategies
- networking
- emotional resilience
- fundamentals in tech
Keywords
- job market
- networking
- AI engineering
- interview tips
- job applications
- emotional resilience
- fundamentals
- Cupe Connect
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Cupe Connect, Parsity, LeetCode
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