This post is a bit overdue, and I’m not really sure what my goal is, other than to maybe give others some hope going into the new year. I interviewed at Meta at the beginning of the month for an E6 role with a referral from someone I used to work with. My perception was that I barely scraped by the tech screen, yet somehow made it to the onsite. Then at the onsite, I did well on the coding rounds, however they were on the easier side of LC medium. The tech retro went well, but surprisingly the behavioral did not, and was just okay (issue communicating/getting the point across due to very different domains). The design interviews were similar: one went well/okay, and I absolutely tanked the other one. After the process was over, I thought I was either getting a soft no, or a down level to E5, yet somehow the recruiter was able to get me the E6 offer. Not only that, but even though I had no competing offers, I got a very generous comp (~640 TC). I accepted it, and am very thrilled to start in 2 weeks. I have a few takeaways from this: 1. More goes into hiring than raw interview performance (past experience, curiosity/interest, connections, etc. all matter). My performance was definitely nowhere near where I thought the bar was 2. Gauging your own performance is hard. Everyone either underestimates or overestimates how well they did. Seems like many on Blind lean towards the latter. 3. Luck is a major factor; don’t view negative interview results as personal failures. I know it had a huge role in me getting my offer, and I also know I would be beating myself up if I didn’t get the job Hope you all have a great 2024, and best of luck in your interviews and endeavors! TC 510 -> 640 Edit: I appreciate all the kind words! Happy holidays, strangers Edit2: added note about referral
Congrats!!
Hell yeah. Congrats OP! Hopefully this is a sign of the market improving even if it’s only a slight improvement
Congrats!
Can you share what system design interviews you got asked please
I’m a bit too specialized, so mine could give away who I am too easily. However I will say this: nothing in the prep guides provided by recruiters or the Alex Xu books prepared me for either one. The process was the same, but the questions were absolute wildcards. My advice: learn the design patterns in big systems (e.g. ETL pipelines, precomputation, streams/caches) and then go a layer deeper (OS internals, product internals, networking, etc.) and then you’ll be more that fine
Well maybe this is also what helped get you hired: your specialized experience . They might care a lot about interview performance for a generalist role
Congrats op. Yes. You are right. We need luck atleast 10%. I interviewed for e5 and got lc hard and medium in screening itself. Eventhough I was able to solve both, I got rejected!
10%? lol! Make it 95% luck.
640k with signon or no signon? YOE and level at Lyft?
With 50k sign on, but I amortized over 4 years
Oh and staff/11yoe
Meta is pretty good at rewarding thought process, especially in complex open ended questions like system design. It helped a lot that you did well on the coding rounds, so they knew you had technical fundamentals at a minimum. Congrats!
Could be selection bias because my experience has been totally opposite of that. It also depends a lot on the interviewer, their interview experience, their mood that day etc. On the other hand I think Google is actually a lot more rewarding for thought process. And I am saying this based on successfully going through Google's interview loop twice (first time in 2021 and second time this month in 2023)
Congrats on the offer! Its great to see positive posts like this on blind. Keep going OP!
Congratulations 🥳. What is yoe? PhD?
11 and no, just MS
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Well done!