AMAJan 13, 2019
AutodeskvCLg47

AMA - How I got multiple offers from FAANG and Tier 1 companies

I see a lot of folks asking about interview preparation and topics to study for the SWE roles at FAANG. Here's a list of topics that I studied and managed to get offers from Facebook, Apple, Lyft, Linkedin, and Amazon. If you study these topics and once you develop a knack of identifying patterns and algorithms, you'd do great. I solved ~150 LC questions and most of the companies asked me LC mediums. I did not study any advanced data-structures like Disjoint Sets, K Dimensional, n-array tree etc. as nobody asked them in any of my interviews including FAANG, Uber, Linkedin, Lyft, Airbnb, Snap, Dropbox, Pinterest and many more. I gave myself a couple of months to prepare and I'd study at least a couple of hours every day and more on weekends. I got LC premium for 35$ and bought 90$ System Groking, did not have any mockup interviews as I initially scheduled interviews at companies that I could use as mocks likes of Walmart Labs, Snap etc. TC: 240K, YOE: 7 Data Structures - Hash-Based DS: Set, HashMap, LinkedHashMap - Lists - Trie - Min, Max Heap - Matrix - Graph - Trees - Stack/Queue - Priority Queue - Bit manipulation Algorithms - BFS & DFS - Sorting & Searching - Recursion (Bottom Up & Top Down) - Backtracking - Intervals, meeting rooms etc. - Island problems - Two pointer approach, three sum - Window sliding - Dynamic programming (Tushar Roy) - Word ladder, word break, word split - LRU, MFU Cache Conceptual Topics - Threads, executor services, futures, semaphores - Generics - BlockingQueue - Memory leak, Garbage collection - Basic Sql operations and queries System Designs - System Design Primer (Github) - White paper on DynamoDB and Kafka - Design common services like Instagram, facebook, google docs, WhatsApp, uber etc. - Read articles on REDIS, Memcached, Cassandra - Grokking the system design Behavioral questions - Read through CTCI section, leetcode explore section and leadership principles - Make a few cases based on STAR format AMA if you have any questions, would love to help fellow blinders to get offers from their dream companies.

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PayPal unionfind Jan 13, 2019

Experiencing burnout rn, have multiple interviews scheduled for the week. What should i do?

Autodesk vCLg47 OP Jan 13, 2019

Try to cover as many LC mediums as possible sorted by frequency if you have them scheduled in next 2 weeks.

New
begin Jan 13, 2019

Great writeup. How did you get referrals?

Autodesk vCLg47 OP Jan 13, 2019

I did not, fortunately, my experience, skills and background helped me get the most of recruiters reached out to me and a couple of recruiters called up after I applied on their company site. My background is is Distributed systems and back end engineering.

Microsoft C😲r🥵n💀 Mar 15, 2020

What do u mean by distributed systems.... What do you work on exactly. Would help me understand what sort of works are categorised as distributed.

Twitter Brahmann Jan 13, 2019

Thanks for this honest post. I am currently preparing for interviews and this post is a great advice.

Autodesk vCLg47 OP Jan 13, 2019

You're welcome!

Proofpoint foodtruckj Jan 13, 2019

Why are you leaving Twitter? Your stock is doing well over last 2 weeks compared to Facebook or Google. Is it because you're tired and need to change things up or are you leaving to change your location?

Facebook public2 Jan 13, 2019

Which offer did you take?

Autodesk vCLg47 OP Jan 13, 2019

I took Apple as they gave me the best numbers and I'm excited about the team and product I'll be working on.

Facebook public2 Jan 13, 2019

Nice, congrats!

LinkedIn Lolllllll Jan 13, 2019

Share the offers?

Autodesk vCLg47 OP Jan 13, 2019

These were the only ones I was considering at the time. Apple: 190/300/100 Facebook: 170/400/50 Lyft: 180/500/40

Microsoft Vgj(5;) Jan 13, 2019

Thanks. YOE?

Microsoft Vgj(5;) Jan 13, 2019

Has anyone asked Bit Manipulation questions? Is it really needed?

Autodesk vCLg47 OP Jan 13, 2019

A dude from Snap asked me about it. If you got time, I'd say at least read through the CTCI section of it.

Microsoft exM Jan 14, 2019

Yes G asked

Chase tjPE83 Jan 13, 2019

What was ur tc and what’s the new offer’s tc?

Autodesk vCLg47 OP Jan 13, 2019

Both mentioned in the post and one of the answers here.

HPE TimB Jan 13, 2019

First time I saw a useful post in Blind. Thank you..

Autodesk vCLg47 OP Jan 13, 2019

✌️

Cisco pmYX06 Sep 25, 2021

Congrats OP. Could you please share your tech stack that you worked on ? Your tech stack attracted so many interview calls.

IBM qaja10 Jan 13, 2019

Thanks for sharing

Autodesk vCLg47 OP Jan 13, 2019

Welcome.

eBay KIXC47 Jan 13, 2019

Location?

Autodesk vCLg47 OP Jan 13, 2019

Bay Area