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Hi All, This year I gave 4 interviews at Zoom, Oracle OCI, Microsoft and Amazon. I did get verbal offers from all of them. Oracle: never returned after I asked for a certain compensation. HM says he is reaching out to higher management regarding compensation and is taking a lot of time there. I liked the team here though. Asked TC:~310k Amazon: They gave a lowball offer, not even meeting my current base salary. I said f$&@ off:) . Worst Interview experience. I felt like i interviewed for Infosys. (wannabes) 218k TC Zoom: It was pretty good interview. Just 2 rounds, 1 coding round where 2 LC mediums were asked . 2nd round was mostly around working knowledge of core frameworks. TC offered: 270K. Excited that this is remote. Microsoft: Best interview experience ever. I just gave it recently and I thought i wouldn’t pass. But to my surprise recruiter told I got a hire. But they have some delays within Azure, so they will get back to me after sometime hopefully. Even if they don’t, I’m glad that I cracked Microsoft which during my childhood, I thought they would only hire geniuses. So a younger-self of me is proud of this. Not a remote position Microsoft interview experience: Out of 4 interviews, I was able to fully solve only one. The first problem i messed up, I tried to understand the question for 30 mins then started coding for the next 15 mins. I know I have problem solving buttom up dp using tabulations so I just tried to do recursively but couldn’t find the solution. 2nd round,I didn’t even solve the last case they had, 3rd guy didn’t even let me code just asked me the time complexities of all the approaches that I could solve it with.He wanted me to comeup with the optimal approach but nlogk was the best I could get, I haven’t checked if there in a O(n) solution for it. But I asked him if I could write this one solution and in the last 10 mins I wrote it. That was the only round where I felt finally I solved. Then I met this last interviewer, Met a real human after all these interviews who valued the interviewee. I opened up so much that when he asked why Microsoft? I just said recruiter reached out. Which one would you choose? How long is Microsoft offer valid for? I’ll be married this year and will need a lot of vacations this year. I don’t know if its fine to be on leave as soon as I join. Also My current company pays out good bonuses which I don’t wanna miss on Jan as well. So next year will be the good time for me to join a new company. What do you guys suggest? Current TC:200K yoe:7
It depends on the team, I’d go for Azure or Zoom depending upon the work. But don’t expect Microsoft TC to be even close, maybe if $ is important go for Oracle.
Position at Fannie?
I dont work at fannie anymore. I was a senior software engineer
Hi congrats on your offers! Would you mind sharing your prep for coding and sys. design? Were most of your coding questions medium difficulty? Thank you in advance.
I found most of the questions were LC easy/medium. For preparations, I didn’t do anything specific this year. but I had done like 5-600 LC till last year. My recent submission was on Nov 2021. For system design I had read grokking system design , system design primer and another book by alex xu called system design interview . And I didn’t read anything deeply, just skimmed over but focused on few technical aspects like what exactly is a rate limiter, what is consistent hashing why is that necessary and all those stuffs. Also watched few system design videos in the past. But that was all long before. So I think understanding a certain concept and why and hows it’s applicable is more important than just reading for interviews. I am not a pro but this is what I did during my interviews. First come-up with the simple design that works, Once you are comfortable, think of all possible i/o &o/p for each module. Then start scaling/tuning and adding more components as you feel necessary according to the design. Then just talk about what can be the single point of failure and how you’d handle that . Sometimes the interviewers ask stupid questions also which might not be there in any books. So use your best judgement and think as if thats your own application that you are designing , that way you’d do great. For coding, What I found is they are not exactly looking for the solution/how long it takes for you to solve it. They are interested in knowing how you think about solving it. So open you mind and speak as if you are teaching your friends how to code. I had this one interview round where I was asked this famous LC question. its optimal solution on LC is O(n) and everyone knows this question who are on the platform. But during the interview the question was tweaked a little bit. so you have to think on your own. the optimal solution came out to be O(logn) which I figured out. Even though i couldn’t solve it perfectly, I got the offer. So dont rush into solution even if you have done the same problem 100 times. Go slow,understand each and everything on the question, do code fast once you both agree on the solution. Thats it. No amount of preparation is fully enough. You just need to try it. Be confident, don’t think interviewer knows all, so just slowly explain your thought process. Try to make them attentive by interacting with them. Thats all I think. Do a lot of interviews that’s itself an practice
Can you share split of Amazon Offer? I haven’t seen an offer this low before
160 base 45 rsu 50k first year signon