I just wanted to share my interview experience for others testing the market right now, since I got a lot of help from others on blind. I did a bunch of interviews over the last few months but eventually landed with an L5 offer at Square that I'm happy with that was about a 175k bump in TC (230k->372k TC). When I began I knew that the hiring market would be a little strange but I wanted to get in somewhere after the huge drops in the stock market this year. Preparation - Last time I was interviewing I struggled to clear phone screens so I hit leetcode pretty hard for the past 2 years to improve. I read DDIA as well since I had never worked on truly large scale systems before. I cannot say enough about how crucial it is to read this book, especially if you're like me and not coming from big tech. Google - passed phone screen but then hiring freeze began. Meta - a friend referred me around the time the general SWE hiring freeze began for L5/L6 so I never really started the process here. Confluent - made it to onsite but the feedback was more or less "coding bad". My interviewer was pretty caught up with one rare go concurrency primitive that I'd not used before. Tesla - I probably was not going to accept offers here due to aggressive RTO policies and lower comp than competitors, but used it as a warm up. I didn't get specific feedback but I felt that most of the onsite went well except for one coding round. Roblox - made it to onsite but system design didn't go well enough. TikTok - cleared 2 coding rounds and then failed a call with the hiring manager. He asked questions about the architecture of the current system I work on and he probably thought that it's bush league (he would be correct) Brex, stripe, cruise, Lyft, figma - these were all passable phone screens which I failed due to over scheduling I think. I was just trying to do too many interviews at once and was very mentally fatigued. Amplitude - feedback from onsite was seemingly positive but they ended up going with a candidate with more experience with cross team projects and large scale systems. Notion - they passed after onsite. Honestly, I really liked the people I spoke to here except for one weirdly passive engineer who barely said anything the whole interview. Apparently this interview didn't go well even though test cases were passing. To illustrate how passive this guy was, he asked me the time complexity of what was basically a topological sort. I say O(V+E). He says OK and moves on. I then learn from the feedback that he thought my time complexity was wrong. Databricks - failed onsite, no feedback given but it was likely one of the coding rounds. Circle - failed onsite due to system design. Waymo - Got an L4 offer which wouldn't have made sense for me to leave my current job for given the non liquidity of waymo stock. Work sounded interesting though. Netflix - hiring manager asked me if there was anything from Netflix' culture deck that didn't resonate with me and I kinda stumbled over this question (am I supposed to say something like diversity bad or self starter bad??). Make sure to have the culture deck out on your computer to look at if you interview here. Salesforce - kinda similar to netflix where I felt that the HM decided very early on in the interviewer that they were going to pass. The interviewer was constantly interrupting me when I was trying to answer questions and it left a bad taste in my mouth. OkCoin - I got a staff level offer here but passed on it due to the large number of red flags this place has. Coupang - sys design and coding were both ok and not good enough. This place seems to be trying very hard to mimic amazon's hiring process and they have their own set of LPs. Atlassian - I got a P5 offer for about $280k TC which wasn't enough of a bump to justify a move. Twitter - passed after onsite. They aren't hiring much at the moment but I reached out to a recruiter I worked with in the past and she found a role they they were trying to backfill. All the interviews were with engineers in India, since their team was trying to have a presence in the US. Not a bad experience, but I struggled to focus at 8PM local time which is when the onsites started. Doordash - system design and coding was below the expected bar. Square - I finally felt that I put together a complete interview performance here after incorporating some feedback from past failures. At a bunch of other onsites I did, 4/5 interviews would go well leading to me being passed on. After I passed the onsite, recruiter asked about leveling and I pushed for L6. The HM submitted me to the hiring bar as L6 but due to lack of experience in working on large scale systems the hiring bar gave me L5. My offer was initially something like 185/180/15 base, stock and sign on bonus. I played a little coy with the negotiation and said that an L6 offer would have been a no brainer but not sure if those current numbers are worth switching companies for. She then came back with 195/180/30 which I accepted. Amazon - system design didn't go well. How do you get recruiters to stop messaging you while you are on a cool down??? Airbnb, snowflake, Pinterest, LinkedIn: I pushed hard to try to get interviews at these places but they were either in some state of hiring freeze or I never made it past the resume screen. I'm not really sure what Airbnb in particular is looking for as I applied to several jobs that I was technically qualified for. Learnings: - don't over book interviews. At times I was doing one onsite loop along with 1-2 phone screens in one day and mental fatigue definitely contributed to 1 or 2 of the failed onsites early on. I'm not sure how people have managed to get 7-8 pending offers on this site at the same time, they are either interview machines or just lying/exaggerating. Every offer I got had at most a 1 week deadline. - Several of these interviews, including square, I got just by cold messages LinkedIn profiles who said they were hiring. Resume drops in this hiring climate seem to be useless, you need to directly get in contact with a recruiter that is trying to fill a job rec. - Actually practice with whatever diagramming tool you plan on using for system design so that you're not spending your interview fighting some diagramming tool with garbage UI/UX - It had been about 4.5 years since I last did interviews and I think in that transition from junior to senior engineer I didn't realize that system design is basically as important as coding at these levels. - Jumping to L6 from outside the "big" tech world is pretty tough. I have worked on process improvements and a lot of the L6-like responsibilities but ultimately I did not have the cross functional experience needed to go straight to L6, although I was kinda close with square (their levels are a little inflated). I'm going to try to hit the ground running and get to L6 in the next year or two to get 500k+ TC Old TC: ~230k New TC: ~375K, hoping for strike price < 50 by the time I start YOE: 7 years
Nice. I would expect you would pass most coding interviews after hitting leetcode for 2 years. What was your actual progress?
I did about 100 easy, 250 mediums and about 75 hards. I found that most of the companies I interviewed with asked more practical questions, I don't think I got asked a single LC hard (maybe at databricks, they asked a hard equivalent, not sure if it is on LC or not). Places like LinkedIn, Google, meta, etc aren't hiring a ton atm and I believe they're a little more likely to ask questions directly from LC
Congrats op. What did they ask in Square?
Around July 4th
Interview bias is a real thing. Good for you that you managed to plough through pre-conceived apprehensions about your candidacy. Now....you are part of club (square is respectable everywhere)....congratulations
Congratulations! And thanks for sharing your experience.
Congrats, but hope that stock price would not go so low. And please never mention this phrase to your colleagues. As a new hire you're in much better place than everyone else in the company and hoping for stock go lower would make you very insensitive to your teammates comp issues.
Why in the world would I broadcast this at work? Lol
Congrats! Would you mind sharing more Square insights?
Atlassian P5 280K? Doesn’t sound right. They didn’t budge from the initial offer?
I didn’t negotiate because I was baited and switched on teams, and didn’t have much of an interest in working on the admin tools team. And yeah the offer was 200 base and 360k stock over 4 years if I’m remembering the verbal offer correctly. 280k seems to be about the average on levels.fyi
I usually tell my friends to interview at multiple places but you did too many :)
You said DDIA was essential, I glanced through the book and found that it was not my cup of tea. Can you describe how useful it was for your square sys design? right now my plan is to do sys design primer (github), alex wu's system design(basically design examples), and read through an easier to digest sys design book I dl'd for free. I know they ask a hotel question but would you provide detail on that(how detailed and if more sys design or api design or object oriented)? I had an interview lined up with them last year but took another offer so I cancelled it. I had always planned on trying later.. and I might do it this coming year.
I got the hotel question too. I think DDIA is good for follow up questions that get asked in L5/6 system design interviews where you handle wrenches that the interviewer tries to throw into your system.
👏🎉 congratulation