I am writing this post because I feel I owe this to the Blind community. A few months ago I decided that it was the right time to consider switching companies. I had got rejects from some of the top companies (Google, Facebook, Dropbox etc) when I had applied during my masters, so needless to say I was extremely anxious about going through the whole process again. But luckily for me, I had a good idea about things I did wrong during my prep the last time and the information I got through Blind posts really helped me a lot. After months of preparation and many interviews, I got offers from Google (L3 SWE), Linkedin (SWE), Lyft (SWE-2), Yelp and Amazon (SWE). Here are some things I did that I believe contributed a lot to my interview performances : 1. Prepare for the company - go through as many blind or glassdoor posts, blogs etc to gain some insight on the interview process. The information you find may not be 100% accurate, so use your judgment as well. My observations are : a) Linkedin : interview process depends largely on the interview track that you get selected for. The interview track determines the teams that you can get matched to if you clear the interviews. For instance, my interview track was "Infra" so I was matched to the teams in Data and infra org. Preparation : Do all the linkedin tagged questions on leetcode. Brush up on system design - System design primer, grokking system design. Revise system design concepts - threads, mutex etc b) Google : there are already a lot of posts on this, that according to me are pretty accurate. But just to reiterate : whiteboard a LOT before the interview. Do Google tagged leetcode questions. Although chances are the exact same questions won't be asked but it still gives a very good idea about the kind of questions Google tends to ask. Often times it can also be a variation of the question already asked before (happened with me). Note that Google interview process is extremely slow so make sure your timeline accounts for that. c) Lyft : a very unique interview process mainly because they have a laptop coding round that seems a lot more intimidating than it really is. Practice leetcode design questions. Grokking system design and system design primer. Do note that I got a lot of this advice from other posts on blind. The intention of this post was just to summarize it as much as possible in one post. 2. The number of leetcode problems we do is in no way related to the number of offers we get. I had this misconception during my masters and was pretty disappointed when I didn't get as many offers even after doing 300 LC questions. But now I realize it was more about how I solved these questions. 3. Discuss tab on leetcode is the most helpful resource ever as it introduces you to so many different approaches for solving the same problem. Lastly its a lot about luck too. But since we can't do much about it focus on preparation. Good luck with your interview prep! Current tc : 160k Yoe: 1.5
Which offer did you take?
Congrats OP! Can you share your numbers for the offers?
Yes, share the offers and which one you took. Given you had multiple competing offers, were you able to negotiate higher TC on any offer?
Accepted Google offer. There wasn't much room for negotiation with Google and linkedin.
Didn’t having multiple good offers help in negotiations with google? I am assuming Lyft and LinkedIn offers were higher than the initial google offer? Did google match that?
Op thanks for sharing your experience Do you know the interview process for LinkedIn swe role?
I have that mentioned in the post :)
Congrats! Did you only have coding rounds for Google?
One behavioral round and 4 coding rounds
Which companies had system design for this level?
Lyft, Linkedin and Yelp
Can you talk about the behavioral round at Google
They asked me about hypothetical situations that can arise at a workplace and how you would deal with it.
May I know how do you get T4 at Lyft with 1.5YOE? Did you negotiate?
Depends upon your interview experience.
Did you apply for backend roles? Or full stack? What was your work at Microsoft?
backend
What other companies did you interview with?also how did you apply for LinkedIn and Lyft? Did you apply online?
I applied for Lyft through a job posting I saw on LinkedIn. Approached a recruiter directly through email since I work for msft