Hey Blind. A month or two ago, I posted that I left my job at Amazon to explore other areas of tech. I promised in that post I would talk later about how my job search went without currently being employed - obviously, that puts you at a native disadvantage. This will be a long post from the perspective of a US citizen in his 20s in a MCOL area. But I hope others experiencing doubt in these challenging times can find it useful. After responding to some comments here, I plan on uninstalling Blind. No, not being currently employed did not impact my prospects. It did very often come with the question of "Why did you leave Amazon?", especially from the non-FAANG companies. My answer was that I had been in the same place for 5 years, and wanted to try something new. Of all the interviewers I spoke to over the last 3 months, only one person was not satisfied by this answer. In terms of prep, I quit in June. I did nothing in June except party and get COVID like an idiot. In July, I started Leetcode 75 and did other misc. questions, which by now amounts to about 350 LC in total. I recommend this study plan; it's good. https://leetcode.com/study-plan/leetcode-75 Companies of almost all sizes still ask LC. Most have system design rounds. My feedback across interviews was almost universally that my coding rounds needed work, and my system design and behavioral are great. I am bad at coding in front of people. lol I received ~20-25 LinkedIn messages from recruiters a week at the beginning. ~5 now. The job market is not dry, but companies are more picky. As well, many companies are expecting RTO, and new hires to relocate. Some companies doing this in my experience: Uber, DataDog, Expedia, eBay. Clarify this during your very first recruiter call. As well, ask what levels people are hiring for - most are looking for only senior+ level, and mid-level positions seem rather dry. After 2 months of relaxed interviewing (~1-4 companies per wk), my main obstacles were: hiring freezes, desire to have me relocate, and salary expectations coming from FAANG being high. I have received: - 5 offers (3 verbal, 2 in writing) - 3 rejections due to failing the interview. Always failing in the LC... - 9 variations of "we've gone into a hiring freeze" - 4 ghosts from Meta recruiters after sending me 1 message (seriously, wtf?) I have interview loops at some companies ongoing that are insanely slow (Dropbox, Microsoft, Google) that I do not plan on finishing because I am bored of not working. Of the offers I received, levels.fyi has been fairly accurate. I am not looking for a TC bump, but I am looking to stay at least around where I was at Amazon, so I rejected significantly lower offers. I am not willing to share most of them due to risk of being identified, but a decent example is an offer of ~170k TC from Expedia. It was pretty standard. They also wanted me to relocate back to Seattle. It was an easy no for me, lol. TL;DR The market is OK, you will all be fine. My TC at my new company will be about the same as at Amazon, but the company I am moving to has a much better WLB and a fantastic benefits program. I am optimistic, and happy I made the move. AMA YOE: 4.5 TC: 345k, MCOL #engineering #software #swe
Thanks for sharing!
I view it as community service.
What company you are joining?
Congratulations 🎊 Where are you moving to ?
I don't plan on sharing that within this post, as the company is of the size the information could probably be used to identify me. But a mid-sized cybersecurity company that has several offices in the US and other countries. Good problems to solve.
Thanks for putting this out there. How many applications did you put in? And how many of those included a first round interview?
I personally applied to about eight positions. Heard back on two of them. The rest I went through either a recruiter reaching out to me, me reaching out to a recruiter, or me looking in my network for an internal referral. I did not ask any companies to skip the phone screen. My goal interviewing was to find a company with good people and good WLB, so I wanted to take as much time as I could to meet different people at each company. I think it was a good decision. It helped me dodge a bullet with an absolute a!@#ole manager at Stripe.
Good to know!
Also, your role is frontend or backend?
Backend/distributed systems. Thus system design being an easier interview roudn for me.
🙌🎉
Congrats! Thanks for sharing.
Congrats! What do you recommend to prepare for System design interview? TIA
Experience. If you don't have a lot of experience with distributed systems, my recommendation varies based on your preferred method of learning. If you like reading, try this github repo: https://github.com/donnemartin/system-design-primer If you like watching/listening to content, you can try the YouTube series by CodeKarle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cODCpXtPHbQ
Were Google MS willing to give remote?
Dmed you for some help
Sure, I'll try.