I wanted to say thank you to everyone on Blind. After 4 months of prep and 6 onsite interviews/offers, I just landed a new role at Google with TC of 245 from 155 at Microsoft with 2 yoe. The amount of information on this app is incredible. It has helped every step of the process. - Learning I could make more at other companies - Interview prep materials: books, leetcode, design - Interview, hiring, and offer process at each company - Expected offers for same yoe and negotiation strategies - First hand experience of what different orgs have to offer - How to max out pay and benefits when leaving Microsoft I'm sure I wouldn't have been able to do it without Blind and the TC trolls. Thank you!
π
Happy 4 u
Congratulations. Please summarize your experience here or in a separate post. It would the best way to say thank you.
Congratulations π Could you please shed some light on how to Max out pay and other benefits when leaving your current company?
This is mostly Microsoft policy specific. It had to do with fitness benefits, vacation payout, health insurance, and how to deal with getting walked out when moving to a competitor.
Congrats!
Congrats!
Congrats! Keep rocking it like a hustler.
Aww mommy loves you tooπ
Congratulations OP. Hoping to put a post like this in 6 months!
Congrats on that! That's a big jump. 245 in SEA or BA? Could you post about your interview prep? I'm looking at a 3-4 month timeline for prep, but, I'm clueless on what all to prepare and how to manage work, prep and interview?
Coding prep: 1) Cracking the Coding Interview. Questions tend to be on the easier side. Great to start out with and get step by step solutions. 2) Elements of Programming Interviews (use the GitHub checker). These questions range from the easier medium to hard. 3) Leetcode. Use questions from here as you continue to prep checking readiness from topics covered in the books. Aim for a mix of difficulty and around 150 to 200 questions. 4) Tushar Roy's YouTube channel. He dives into solutions for many hard DP questions. Personally, I didn't encounter any during my interviews, but it helped my confidence in solving hard problems from scratch. This covers ~500 questions after you should have a solid grasp on all the types of questions and their solution patterns. Design prep: 1) Use "System Design Primer" on GitHub. Cover the topics then dive into sample problems and their solutions. 2) Grokking the System Design Interview. This is a paid course that walks you through common system design problems. 3) If you're aiming for a higher level, make sure to read FANG engineering blogs (links found on GitHub in (1)) and other popular white papers. What also helped me was scheduling code screens with companies I didn't care about during my prep for FANG interviews. This might be controversial since it's wasting other's time, but for me it helped get out the nerves and determine what other areas I could continue working on
Thanks, MS for the detailed response. Doing ~500 problems is almost equivalent to doing 4 problems a day. This could be anywhere between 90 minutes to 4 hours, while preparing. (Excluding the time spent on design, applying for roles, etc.) How did you go about balancing your work and prep?