Backend engineer offer in SF Bay Area Current TC- 260k YOE 9 Google L5 ~ 440k Base 200k RSU 1st yr 190k front-loaded sign on 50k Uber L5A ~ 445k(excluding bonus) Base 207k RSU 1st yr 195k front-loaded signon 45k Discretionary Cash bonus 35k Doordash E5 ~ 455k Base 220k RSU 1st yr 200k -same for 4 yr Signon -35k What I value 1. Good WLB. I don’t want to coast. I want to work on interesting projects and have breather in between. In Amazon, it’s constant work, everything is perceived high priority which is mentally draining. 2. Career growth 3. Stability. I am on H1B Edit: Thank you all for the wishes. To answer some of the questions, 1. Experience so far - I have been L5 at Amazon from past 3 years. I worked in India for a few years and moved to US and had to start in Amazon at L4 after my graduation. I worked on large scale distributed systems so I have experience in design and operational excellence. I felt like I applied a lot of ops knowledge to system design questions 2. Interview journey- I haven’t interviewed in past 5 yrs and I started preparing from Dec last year and gave my first interview in April and last interview in July. Spent the whole of Dec break leetcodin. I interviewed with 12 companies. Went to on-site for all. No Google phone screen. My first two interviews were with second preference companies and those went well so I felt confident about cracking my top ones - Airbnb and Netflix. I tanked Netflix royally and Airbnb interviewers were too absent to evaluate me. I did Meta well but then came the hiring freeze. I failed Stripe, Roblox and Databricks on-site. Tough DP questions during on-site by new grads who were intent on a particular approach. By this time I lost hope and started looking internally. But I had also had enough practice for system design. I decided to do the last wave of companies that I had already started talking to. I cracked all of them and you see the above offers. 3. Coding prep - leetcode all the way. I solved 300 questions and did many more mentally. Except for one round in Meta, I did not get any questions from company specific list. The interviews where I did well were the ones I actively solved the problem on the spot. Roblox, and Databricks asked DP questions. Databricks questions were complex and needed super long solutions so I always ran out of time there. Focused on BFS, DFS, String manipulation, graphs, stack, queue. Redoing the same questions multiple times ingrained the concepts in me. 4. System design- first 5 interviews, I felt like I have lot of information to give and too less time / under confident / focused on interviewer and got nervous based on their reaction/ blabbered a lot cause nervous. Then I practiced couple of times talking to myself and drawing the block diagrams. Once I hit rock bottom and mentally settled on moving internally, I got over my nerves. All interviews post that went smoothly. I spoke clearly and concisely, didn’t care about interviewer reaction, paused for a minute when I was unsure what approach to take and spoke out my thought process. Sources - Searched Blind a lot for what other folks are studying and used the following based on that. Thanks to everyone DDIA( read all chapters . Best learning for me was chapter on replication) Amazon Dynamo paper- best source for system design. I thoroughly and genuinely enjoyed reading this Alex Xu system interview book - good book to start off with. Grokking the system design For each common system design question, I used multiple sources to design my approach, one I can explain and justify based on my experience. Practiced the block diagrams on a tool of my choice. Used that tool in all interviews. #engineering #google #uber #amazon #doordash
DoorDash is still hiring?
Yes
Yeah. Also I found the team at Doordash lot more positive about the company and welcoming than others. Uber folks seemed a bit worried about the stock. Doordash folks not much
Bay Area? In any case, google seems like a no brainer given you’re looking for stability. 440k is a good L5 offer I think. Surprised they didn’t lowball. Mind sharing how many LCs you did?
Yes Bay Area. My interview went really well. I solved about 300. But I went through a lot more and mentally solved them after the initial 300.
How was your interview experience? And the kind of questions asked?
Google does not have yearly bonus?
It does. Standard 15%. But Uber recruiter advertised the bonus as a part of TC. Without that Uber TC is lesser compared to others. I am not sure how target/discretionary bonuses work. I am talking to friends to understand the nuances of it.
U shud add that target bonus to ur TC and update ur post. From what I have heard u shud get that and it can go to 2X based on ur performance
Google based on your requirements and not much TC difference. Google much more stable. Just make sure you join the team you like. Uber from what I know has aggressive culture similar to Amazon. DD also most likely have more work expectations.
Uber culture is absolutely nothing like Amazon’s
Is it worse than Amazon?
Google, it’s a no brainer
Uber was giving 680k over 4 years until last week. Did you negotiate with them?
Where did you see that?
Uber gave me 820k in month of April. But after that they cut RSU by 30%. I think max now is 650k for L5A
I got a very similar offer from Google and I accepted it recently. Congrats OP! See you on the other side. What team are you considering joining?
What was your SD prep like keeping L5 in mind?
Congrats
I'd actually vote for doordash. It's got the most interesting projects and fastest career growth. Google and Uber suffer due to their front loading of offers and your comp drops in year 3,4. And don't believe refreshers will make up for the drop, it won't. At dd you'll get more refreshers with equal vesting so your TC will be more.
Is there any data about DD giving out more refreshers? Past threads don't show that. Also how does equal vesting means TC will be more? Over 4 years it should be still be same. I'd actually like to front load in case I want to jump.
Ops comp for first year is 440k at G Which has max percentage of vesting Which is I think 35. Dd has 455k but with 25% vesting in first year. Higher comp with less percentage of shares being vested. Hence you can see that g comp is less in 4 years.
Your Google TC for year 1 is around 470k if you include 15% target bonus.
+1
Google is gonna win by a landslide
I thought so. One thing about Google I hear off late is that it’s too laid back and work is not exciting enough. I don’t want that. With Uber and Doordash, I feel like I have more opportunities to take on more ownership and grow.
True, but both of those companies are much more unstable imo