Preparing for SWE interviews

A few months back, I started applying for jobs in the Bay Area. The community here at Blind helped me in my interview prep and also while negotiating my offer. I'm extremely grateful to be a part of this community and I'm sharing my experience here just as a big THANKYOU for getting me through the rough days! 1) Job Applications: After finding a suitable role in a company, I applied online, I connected with a few employees on LinkedIn as well as friends for referalls. Referrals work strong, I got a few calls in less than a week after being referred. I have seen four kinds of interviews 1) Coding interviews: A lot of companies ask you a coding question for the initial phone screen and during the on-site loop (now virtual) you'll most likely see a round or two of such questions. The way I prepared for these questions is by reading through a few chapters in the book "Cracking the Coding Interview" and solving a few questions in it just to build a basic understanding. I moved to leetcode to practice problems, I solved about 2-3 problems each day. As I started getting interview calls, I purchased the leetcode premium subscription and focussed on company specific problems. The premium subscription is pretty useful! 2) System Design Interview: I found the below github link extremely helpful in learning the basic concepts of System Design https://github.com/donnemartin/system-design-primer#study-guide I purchased Grokking the System Design Interview course, but I did not find it very helpful. It was not worth it. Instead, I'd recommend practicing the problems in the index of that book (you can view them for free). You can easily find youtube videos for each of those topics. If you go through those videos, you can form your own solution and that'll help you prepare for the interview. The rest is just experience! 3) Machine Learning: Some basic questions in ML are asked during the initial phone screen if you are appearing for a ML position. For that, I'd recommend going through all the topics mentioned in this link https://github.com/ShuaiW/ml-interview The content for each topic in this link might not be sufficient, so you may have to go beyond this link to revise each concept properly. Next, you may have a ML System Design question too. For an hour they'll give you a ML specific question and you have to walk over its design with them. For example, how will you collect the data, what kind of data, which model will you use, how will you test the accuracy and so on so forth. Reading company blogs is also very helpful. YouTube recommendations, Airbnb search ranking, feed ranking and ad click prediction are some problems that you can practise. 4) Behavioral interview: Read about the "STAR" method. Answer every question based on the STAR method. Prepare atleast 10-15 situations from you real life that you can use while answering questions in this interview. Situations that will highlight your personality. Be honest and truthful. Get the interviewer involved in your story, if that happens, the rest of the interview will be a breeze. I hope this helps and wish you a goodluck if you have an upcoming interview :) #interview #machinelearning #interviewkickstart #swe #behavioralinterview #codinginterview #systemdesign #systemdesigninterview

donnemartin/system-design-primer

GitHub