Me:
Facebook <—- Data scandal
Amazon <—- culture & seemed underwhelming
Apple <—- Already worked there, wanted something new
Raytheon <—— Ethical reasons
Twitter <—— Meh
LinkedIn <—— Joined Microsoft
EA <—— Wanted to join a company which had multiple products outside of gaming.
Some Startups <—- Was over startups.
FinTech Companies <—- Wasn’t into fintech
comments
I had 10 on-sites, resulting in 8 offers. I chose Google finally.
// *From final offer stage* //
Facebook: culture
Amazon: culture and comp and benefits (also practice interview). Work wise, I felt this was most interesting though.
Intuit: comp
Atlassian: comp
Lyft: tough call between Google and Lyft, but didn't want to commute to SF
Box: practice interview
Stripe: practice interview
// *Rejected sooner* //
Robinhood, Credit Karma, Microsoft, LinkedIn, Slack, ServiceNow (interviews were scheduled well after I had multiple offers in hand, so decided to drop off)
// *Companies that rejected me* //
Apple (on-site), Uber (on-site), Elastic (resume review)
Fwiw, this was my 3rd reject with Apple. I don't know what I do wrong there!
On the flip side, culturally they are great, and were quite open about these challenges during the interview. Their interviews were also quite pragmatic, not the usual leetcode grind (for example in one of the interviews I was asked to find a bug in an open source library and suggest fixes with pros/cons, then implement one of them). I see some of Amazon leadership traits such as customer obsession baked into their offering. Many of their APIs written years ago still work even if only a tiny portion of their customer base use it. For this, I feel confident that the company will do well because of the customer focus.
This is not bad, but I prefer companies that are a bit more tech focused.
Intuit - practice
Realtor.com - practice
Google: does anyone actually work here? Half-baked products, people writing treatises on internal mailing lists and quora instead of building something, earning high TC but what's the point?
Microsoft has interesting projects and boring ones. So does Google. I was choosing between an exciting project @ MS vs a boring one at Google. Here we are.
My pay is amazing, and I’m learning alot. I have 0 regrets about my decision!
Uber: really tough call but decided that the improvement in TC wasn’t enough to justify leaving fb yet what with all the benefits and pretty good projects.
Amazon - TC was low, Seattle offer meh, culture.
Doordash - preferred fb offer as wanted liquid stocks.
Bloomberg - No RSUs
Belzabar - culture
YOE 2