Six months journey

I’m M/mid thirties worked at small startup. TC 220. Thanks to Blind I’m determined to start interviewing to get higher TC. I want to share my experiences and want to let anyone who is struggling that you are not alone. There are so many things you “can’t” control For my first three on-sites I couldn’t sleep much. On average I slept like 2 hours each night in the hotel. It was one of the reason I didn’t perform well enough. I soon realized that I couldn’t fix the sleep problem so on the fifth interview I actually flew directly to the on-site and skip the hotel. Guess what, it got worse. My flight got delayed for six hours and in the end I’m went to the onsite right away without having lunch etc. At the end of the interview I was exhausted and took too many hints for one LC hard. Stay focus or don’t interview if you are not ready. My responsibilities are similar to MLE but I applied too broadly: SWE, data scientist and MLE. As a results I have to prepare LC, Machine Learning/Deep Learning, System Design, SQL (spent like 10 SQL questions on LC). It really showed in the interview performance. When I prepared very well for DL I got slowed on LC medium in other interview. When I prepared for LC I then failed on ML. Another evidence is for my first 4 interviews I only completed like 80-120 LC (mostly easy/medium). In hindsight I should have reviewed problems and complete more LC problems. Spend enough time to review LC problems I realized I completely forgot LC problem after 5-12 days especially the tricky ones. It’s frustrating but you have to keep going. In the end I reviewed about two times each problems for around 200 problems. I felt much more comfortable when I reach close to 300 problems. Toward the end I also participate on Weekly Contest. As the result on the google interviews I completed 3 LC medium quite comfortably but I made some mistakes on time complexity. In the end I had two offers but it didn’t work out because it required me to relocate. If you read until here I hope you realized that there are so many things you can’t control and the only way to improve your chance is to over prepare. Do not ask question like how many LC, how many hours etc. It doesn’t matter you already know the answer, if you are not ready then you are not ready. Companies that I interviewed: Glassdoor, Linkedin, Facebook, Snap, Amazon, Stitch fix, Postmates, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Intuit and two series B startups. Stitchfix is the one I’m impressed the most. They respected the candidate, the process was really quick and the HM was really smart. feel free to DM me for any tips. (this account is not my real email btw).