[Giving back] My L4 SWE Interview Study Guide

Long time lurker here. I want to give back to the community and share some resources that I found extremely useful when preparing for technical interviews. I started applying on LinkedIn in mid-April and received a response from the following companies: Facebook, Google, Amazon, Uber, Lyft, Square, VMWare, Oracle, etc. *Coding/Leetcode* To be fair, I have been doing leetcode on and off for 5 years to prepare for internship and full-time interviews. I have memorized solutions for some popular questions but every time, I start a new LC session to keep track of how many questions I have solved. (FYI I did 426 questions (146/241/21) in 37 days). Here is what I did (in this particular order): 1. Choose a programming language you are comfortable with. I used Python and I read "Elements of Programming Interviews in Python: The Insiders' Guide" twice to familiarize myself with the most common DS&A you will see in coding interviews. I would not suggest jumping into LC right away. I think having a solid foundation and understanding of DS&A is more important than the number of LC you solved. 2. The LC grind began once I finished EPI. Instead of solving the most commonly asked questions, I found it extremely useful to follow a curated list of questions. Remember, quality > quantity. The list I used is Blind 75, Neetcode 150 (Blind 75 + 75 additional great questions), and Sean Prashad's Leetcode Patterns. You can notice that only 5% of the questions I solved were hard. Unless you are a competitive programmer, I found it hard to solve an LC hard within 45 minutes with no guidance. I didn't want to waste time getting stuck on hard questions so I decided to only focus on the most common hard questions. 3. I did not allow myself to be stuck on a question for more than 15-20 minutes. It's because, in a normal coding interview, you only have 45 minutes max to solve 1-2 LC medium. You will not get extra points if you solve an LC hard after being stuck on it for 4 hours. Some LC questions offer tips so make sure to use them. If there is an official solution available, I will skim through it, understand the optimal strategy and code it from my memory. No interviewer expects a flawless candidate so it's okay to ask for help when you are stuck. 4. Once I finished the curated list of questions, I started doing LC assessments. I also found them extremely useful for three reasons: - There are FAANG-specific assessments available on LC so I got a sense of how hard the questions are going to be. - I was able to regurgitate solutions for questions I have seen, further strengthening my long-term memory. - If I haven't seen the questions before, it serves an interview-like environment, where I was solving questions within time constraints and under stress. After I was comfortable with LC assessments, I finally started doing company-tagged questions. *System Design* This was my first time preparing for system design interviews. I found it very intimidating at first because my work at MSFT does not involve designing a scalable distributed system at all. With lots of reading and YouTube videos though, I was able to get comfortable with it. Here is a list of material I used to study for system design interviews (in this particular order): 1. Grokking the system design interview - I found this very beginner-friendly. It's a good starting point for beginners like myself. 2. System Design Primer - I also found this very informative and beginner-friendly. It's a must-read and it's free. 3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKjm4ehYiMs&t=1s&ab_channel=AWSEvents - great video on how you can scale your system with different cloud technology. 4. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1m6UgeWa0ttIdAIJ5Y1NljGE3_nOPlSe9/view - I stumbled upon this on Blind and I found it very useful. It contains a battle-tested format for system design interviews (the author claimed to have passed Amazon L6 and several FAANG system designs with it). 5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-0g_aJL5Fw - I found this very realistic. The questions that the interviewer asked are pretty much what's going to be asked in real interviews. 6. https://www.youtube.com/c/SystemDesignInterview - very technical and detailed *Behavioral* Since I had an Amazon onsite, I was forced to read their 16 leadership principles (LP). I had 1-2 stories in STAR formats for each LP so I have around 25-30 unique stories in total. I was also able to reuse a lot of the stories I prepared for Amazon on behavioral rounds for Google and other companies. IMPORTANT: make sure to have at least 1-2 stories for the following topics: 1. Failures/mistakes 2. Tight deadline/didn't meet deadlines 3. Confrontation with co-workers 4. Criticisms from managers/co-workers All the behavioral questions I got were variants of https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-question/437082/Amazon-Behavioral-questions-or-Leadership-Principles-or-LP. *Sleep* The key is to have a balanced schedule between your 9-5 work, study, and rest, as well as having the determination to stick with the schedule no matter what. For example, I spent at least 2-3 hours after work every day for the past 1.5 months doing LC, system design, and writing down good stories for behavioral. I also tried my best to get a good sleep every night after studying. Sleeping is like hitting a save button on your brain and having a good sleep also prepares you to absorb new information the next day. Blind tax: L62, YOE 3 years TC at MSFT: 190k (150/30/10). Cliff in March 2023, will be earning significantly less due to peanut refreshers. New TC (AMZN L5): 300k ish (180k base, 200k signing for 2 years, 200k stocks for 4 years)

System Design Interview

YouTube

System Design Interview Guide rev3.pdf

Google Docs

System Design Mock Interview: Design TikTok ft. Google TPM

YouTube

Loading...

LeetCode

AWS re:Invent 2019: [REPEAT] Scaling up to your first 10 million users (ARC211-R)

YouTube