Facebook E5 vs DoorDash E5 vs Snap L4

First time creating a post, there may be many things missing. My background: -SDE II at Amazon for 3 years -5 YOE -TC: 280K I started interviewing in July for these three companies, and had virtual onsites last week. Luckily, all of them decided to move forward with an offer. Money is important, but more important things to me are work-life balance, no toxic politics (like Amazon), and I can see my career growth. So even though a company pays me the most, but if the price is to sacrifice my personal life and to get tons of politics, then I wouldn't want to join that company. Any feedback is appreciated, below are some of my **personal** thoughts. Edited: Got the official offer letters from two of them, so updating them here. 1. Facebook Level: E5 Pay: -Base: $190K -Equity: $630K/4 years -Sign-On: $60K -Bonus: 15% Personal Thoughts: Seems to have a lot of space to grow, but WLB could be bad, not sure about politics though. 2. DoorDash Level: E5 Pay: -Base: $180K -Equity: $500K/4 years -Sign-On: $15K Personal Thoughts: Its business is expanding very quickly in the past two years, but there are too many competitors, not sure how it would go in the next 5 years. 3. Snapchat Level: L4 Pay: -Base: $180K -Equity: $540K/3 years -Bonus: 10% Personal Thoughts: A lot of smart people working from there (two of the interviewers came from Google). Culture seems to be great, but not sure about how can their product grow in the next few years. Would TikTok be taking over (hopefully not). Update 8/31: I ended up taking Facebook, which I believe gives me more flexibility in terms of which team to join, while the WLB may not be great which I'm already aware of. ===================================================================== If you don't care about why I'm looking to switch job, you could stop reading. But if you're interested in the story, thank you and please continue reading from here. I have been working at Amazon as an SDE II for more than three years. Things had gone well, my L6 manager worked hard to give me good projects to take lead, and also spent times reviewing the work summary with me, so I thought I am on the track for promotion in the next year or so. I even got an "exceed" rating earlier this year, I once thought that would be the place I want to work forever. Unfortunately, my good L6 manager decided to switch team, and not long after that, a new L5 manager joined my team. Things started to flip upside down. Not only did that L5 manager not care about my work summary (not even trying to review or submit for assessment), he also declined my PTO request in July, and made me on-call for every two weeks (my team has 6 people, and 4 of them had vacation while I had to be on-call). I was really angry, and brought that up to my skip level, things had gone worse. Since then, I am only assigned to work on shits, like tech debts, small SIMs, etc. I was worried that I would be PIP soon, so I realized there is no way to stay in the team (or the company) anymore. So I started looking for jobs by just enabling "Open for Work" (of course only visible to recruiters, you don't want to have the "green belt" shown on your profile picture). Luckily, recruiters started reaching out to me on the second day. I started the process with Facebook, DoorDash and Snapchat from there, and scheduled phone screens in late July. After interviews were scheduled, I bought LeetCode premium and started practicing problems every single night, and at least for 6-8 hours during weekends. I stopped playing video games and stopped watching PH/JAV to make sure that I stay focused. 1-2 days before the screening interviews, I kept practicing on the company-tagged LC problems to make sure I'm familiar with the algorithms and solutions, and able to type the code fast (this is especially important for Facebook interviews, since you only have about 15 minutes for each problem, including explanation, testing, etc.). Luckily, I was asked the questions that I am already familiar with (all easy/medium LC problems), the interviewers were also nice, so was able to move forward to virtual onsites for all three of them. Since then, I bought books including DDIA, Insider's guide, etc. Other than LeetCoding, I started to thoroughly read the DDIA book (especially Chapters 5, 6, 7, 10 and 11, which I had read them at least twice). While the Grokking and insider's guide are useful, I found them useful in a way that they would tell you what you should cover for each of the commonly asked SD questions (ex. for typeahead, you're expected to bring up Trie, while for proximity service, you're expected to bring up QuadTree, etc.). It may be a good thing that I was assigned only small tasks and shits to work on in my team, so I had time to study and LC at night, and did the same thing for at least 10 hours on the weekends. Two weeks before the virtual onsites, I started finding partners for mock SD interviews from Discord channels. Luckily, I was able to partner with people who have >10 YOE, and they were able to give me good feedback and I was able to learn from them by giving them back a mock. I thought I would be able to get even more professional feedback by having paid interviews, so I decided to go with interviewing.io to get two SD mocks. The first one went well, and the interviewer gave some good feedback, but it seems like the feedback is templated. So I paid for another one with dedicated FB engineer (more expensive). However, that one went bad, while I was explaining my solution, I kept hearing the interviewer typing messages on her phone, and kept hearing the notification sounds. After that, she only gave me 2-3 sentences for the feedback which were useless (ex. make sure your solution works, your math is off, etc.). I felt that was a waste of money, so I recommend to take those mocks at your own risk. A day or two before the real interviews came up, I relaxed my study plan a little, as I wanted to make sure I get good sleep without too much stress/anxiety in order to attend the interviews at the best condition. Luckily, all interviews went well, had been enjoying the conversation with the interviewers, the experience was overall positive. I thought even though I end up getting rejected, those experiences are still great, and I'm still able to learn something. About a week after the onsites, I luckily got calls from the recruiters telling me that they decided to move forward with offers. That was really a huge relief for me, as I know that I now have an option to get away from that asshole L5 manager. If you are reading until here, thank you so much. I'm not here to share anything specific like interviewing skills (everyone has their own preference), but I just wanted to release the things that have been in my mind for months.

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