Revving up for FAANG design applications
Getting ready to apply to FAANG for Product Design roles. We hear a lot on here on how a SWE should prep — curious to hear if the design community has any tips to succeed? Here’s my current list of to dos: - Read through “Solving Product Design Exercises” + lookup and read any design exercise articles already out there - Spruce up portfolio to highlight best 2-3 projects and highlight any management experience if possible (know my stories by heart) - Ask current network at FANG for referrals - Go through 2-3 rounds of non-FANG interviews for practice - Line up in person interviews within same month, so if I get offers I get them at the same time and can use them as leverage to get best TC Anything else I’m missing? Any tips on how to do well during in-person? I’ve previously interviewed with MS twice in-person for intern positions when I was in college but didn’t get in. YoE 4 TC: $130k
Educate yourself on what the team does and ask questions about how the experiences they are creating support the company mission. All things being relatively equal I usually make the offer to the person most intellectually curious. I also like to see failures and what you learned from it.
Not even Google takes four months, and they’re open about how deliberate their process is. Only way it would take that long is if you spend a lot of time on the design exercise.
At Netflix you will do best if you bring clear examples of what you’ve done and are able to articulate the impact it has had (with clear and defensible success metrics). Take the lead in the white board exercise, don’t be passive. Be ready to interview with an eng and a few PM’s. Be ready to negotiate about what you want to learn, why you want to learn it, what you will do next, and how your solution solves for the original hypothesis.
Define “spruce up” portfolio. This above all is probably most important, because it’s your chance to show how you frame problems, how effectively you tell a story, how you worked with PMs and SDMs to get things built with acceptable trade-offs and the like. I think a lot of people fall into the trope of showing incomprehensible sketches, eye-chart flows, and a series of mocks that don’t resolve anything. Don’t just check boxes! Make it really clear what the impact was. You can try to leverage for the best TC, but I’d advise going for the team you feel best about first. You’re a designer, the money isn’t gonna be everything. There are, for instance, former FAANG designers at Oracle getting paid inordinately well and feeling sad about their circumstances.