Thought I would share my onsite experience with dropbox and uber. Currently at FB E6 with TC ~570k. FB (7 YOE) is good but wanted to give a shot outside and see how things are (also nothing wrong to keep to those interview skills sharp) Dropbox interview process is fairly straight forward. Phone screen coding and followed by onsite that has 2 coding rounds, 1 design, 1 with hiring manager and 1 where they drill down on your projects. The process was smooth and I really liked the people. They came across as really mature, smart and very friendly. I really liked the hiring manager and another engineer. They left 10 minutes to discuss their experiences at Dropbox and some of their toughest challenges. I felt the engineering challenges are great. The consistent downside I saw was that no one really displayed optimism about DB future. The interview went well. I knocked coding (leetcode mediums) and other technical aspects. Got offer as IC3 with TC ~400k. I pushed for IC4 but got declined. Down-leveling is common in tech :(. Eventually I declined the offer Pros: Really good culture, smart people, nice challenges, friendly folks Cons: Felt the company is slow paced. Not really optimistic about future. TC is ok for IC3. Recruiting process is super slow Uber interview process is similar as well except there is a bar raiser round (seems copied from Amazon). Phone screen was pretty trivial with coding (leetcode medium/hard). The onsite had 1 coding, 1 design, 1 on past projects, 1 with hiring manager and 1 bar raiser (with minor problem solving). The tehchnical aspects went super good. Completed coding, problem solving easily. I felt these are a tad easier due to more practice. I really liked couple of engineers who did coding & design, felt they were handling interesting large scale reliability problems. The one on past projects and bar raiser went bad. I got super upset when the interviewer was trying to showcase superiority. They Nit-picked a great deal and argued how I am wrong (I handled the same problems at FB scale lol). Bar raiser was a joke. It is very similar to the one with hiring manager and I was super bored and tired (trust me this happens after 4 hours of non-stop discussion) with the same set of questions. As expected I didn't get the offer. Pros: Fast paced, people are more optimistic about growth, turn around time on the whole process is super amazing (just 1 week), large scale !! Cons: culture is super bad, loop is not set properly, everyone was super serious, not friendly at all. Trying to see if it make sense to go for Stripe/Lyft or Pinterest
Thanks for sharing your interview experiences. I love your writing style with clear concise thoughts! You should have let the interviewer at Uber know your current tc to politely indicate that he has no credibility to nitpick on you when you have worked on projects at a bigger scale than him whilst making more money than him.
haha. I didn't want confrontation. I did 300 interviewers at FB and usually want to leave good feel for the candidates no matter a hire/no-hire. Quite surprisingly I didn't see that maturity with couple of interviewers
Did you go into the Uber interviews expecting them to be bad?
Not really. I have a good friend working there and said the culture changed a great deal over the last year. One of my friend who worked during 2016 had bad experiences which he shared a while back. The phone screen interviewer was also pretty nice, so I had no reason to suspect
Ok, sorry to hear you had a bad experience.
No offense to people at Uber, but by far, I have seen a lot of people at the company being self absorbed. Mostly in their late 20s or early 30s, and acting like years of industry experience with insurmountable knowledge for others to compete with them. Some of them just need a reality check.
Proves my point above, SELF-ABSORBED 😂
Goddamn. 400k for IC3? I'm so underpaid....
From your description, you missed the bar on the bar raiser not because of your technical skill. Do you often get mad at Facebook when a colleague pushes you on your design? We are interested in your people skills as well, especially when you are being interviewed for senior/staff level.
Well that’s no excuse to just being a self righteous dick as an interviewer. Plus this guy works at fb making close to 400k tc. What credibility does your interviewer have to nitpick on this guy? Your interviewer should be lucky to get an on-site with fb actually lol 😂
The TC he quoted is very likely due to FB stock appreciation. It is quite unlikely that he’d be offered anything like that if he interviewed at FB today. And it’s unlikely he’ll continue to enjoy such generous remuneration now that the market seems to have peaked. If you are impressed by inflated TCs, then, based on Uber’s 409a, he could have anticipated an increase of his “TC” by at least 50%, had he been successful.
@Phlebotomy is jealous 😂
Good summary! Sucks you didn't get IC4. I don't see many people get offers at that level btw. Typically, it's due to design and scope at your job.
Yep. Ic4 is hard anywhere to get. Recruiter tried hard to find teams that match ic4 scope and i had to talk with multiple teams. Too bad it didn’t work
Similar thing happened to me. Seems like they're just more careful with IC4 level. Well, glad you had a good experience, at least
Good post! I was recently declined for a PM role at Uber and got the same impression from them. Arrogant and self-righteous.
Tech Industry
2h
218
More money == more problems
Tech Industry
Yesterday
843
Do you really think Amazon is that bad
Work Visa
Yesterday
6077
Last h1 attempt
India
Yesterday
1433
Slavery has REVERSED! the US is the slave!!! Check out this dude who pays a personal trainer in India
Tech Industry
Yesterday
677
Best LCOL or MCOL city?
Did you join FB as a new grad?
yes