Hi Blind community, have been wanting to put my thoughts on Interview kickstart for a while now. Got busy with life :slightly_smiling_face: . But I do see a few posts asking whether it's worth taking the program or not so I felt to talk about my experience. TC before Doordash - Base 220K Pre IPO Options - ~10k at a strike price of 5$ TC at Doordash Base - 280k RSU - 450K Joining bonus + relocation - 50K Total for 1st year - 780K My background - I am an EM since 2014. Been with large enterprise non Faang companies and some small startups. I wanted to go to Faang in 2020. I was kinda confident about leadership competencies ( people, process, project, product etc ). System design had always been my weak area. I lost many onsites in 2019 ( Lyft , Flexport etc ) because of inability to crack system design interviews. In 2020, i wanted to just target Amazon, Google and Facebook. After roughly 2-3 months of prep, I took the onsite interviews . Failed in all three. Obviously didn't get thorough feedback from recruiters. It boiled down to cracking system design, giving verbose answers for behavioral questions, too simple failure stories etc. The story repeated for Databricks, Compass and a few other companies as well. I heard about IK in 2020 but I think my pride stopped me to take a course to crack interviews :slightly_smiling_face: . After all the failures, I wanted to try alternate methods to crack Faang companies. I joined IK in Jan 2021. Now about the program Pros - Omkar is the star lecturer for algos and DS . He is better than some of the best lecturers at NC state university. He elucidates very complex topics by real life analogies. His foundational videos are stellar. Niloy is the star lecturer for system design. I have listened to his recorded videos at least 15 times. I have attended many of his coaching sessions too. Anirudh Chaturvedi is great in system design coaching sessions. He listens to all questions patiently and answers them based on the student's understanding capability. he also provides additional resources to further reading. Mock interviews are feedback are pretty close to real Faang interviews. I used mock interviews to take guidance how i can improve my answers to various behavioral questions. What I did not use I didn't go to coding coaching classes I even skipped DP live class None of the companies asked me to code ( Stripe, Uber and Doordash ). Facebook and google might have asked me but I didn't give those interviews. I didn't use IK to get interview calls The behavioral sessions were pretty basic for EM Areas of improvement Students ask a lot of questions in the live class which sometimes increases the class duration or the lectures may skip a few topics. I didn't see a process / discipline to complete the set of topics in the given time consistently. I joined a general cohort. Would have preferred an EM cohort. Looks like they started one recently. For my TC difference before and after IK, I felt the cost is justified. Hope this helps !! Thank you. #engineeringmanagercomp #interviewkickstart #doordash
What is the “success” rate of interview kickstart and similar programs? For every success story like yours above (kudos to you btw) Are there stories where people felt the program was overrated and didn’t make much of a difference? It’s important to lay out both sides. Also, I don’t mean to be cynical but DoorDash is a “hot” just ipod company. They’re known to pay quite well like other companies in this same scenario. Yes, the jump here is justified for yourself to have gone to the program, but true objectivity seems to be missing here. Maybe someone else got a job at another good company but the jump wasn’t that much (but justified for that company), then viewpoints might be different
Is it a promotion for IK? How much r u getting paid.
He already told you - 780K :-)
Is this an ad?
Rsu and TC may be calculated incorrectly
Is 450K RSU divided by 4 or per year?
So now ppl have to earn masters and attend ik too to clear interviews ? Fucking where are we heading ? Why should some one do masters then ? Just do leetcode and attend ik
The degree may help in first job. I am already telling my kid to focus just on Leetcode. Don't worry about ivy league college. Get CS degree from anywhere, do IK and then give interviews.
Ehhh in my experience degree from MIT, CMU, etc does help.
Paid post
OP was this for an EM or Senior EM at DoorDash ?
Senior EM
I can guarantee that this is not a paid post.
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Sad that there are companies which don’t test ability to code for ‘engineering’ managers, thanks for pointing them out here!
Why would you want EM’s to be evaluated for coding skills?
Cause that doesn’t leave much of a difference between TPMs and EMs