I was rejected to Spotify (SWE, 4 YoE, AWS) for doing well technically but not having the right "domain specific skills" What did I do wrong?
When I've heard that it's typically referring to knowledge about their specific stack, or more broadly what they're trying to do/what their business is about. Any of those sound right?
Admittedly, they wanted someone who lives and breathes data pipelines vs a general backend Engineer
If they had another candidate who did, then who knows.
Did you have any design rounds? If so, how do you think you did? Design rounds tend to be real-ish and relevant to the company/team. If you don’t impress there, then you may appear to be a junior programmer (even a very good one) when they’re looking for a senior engineer. With 4 yoe, I’m sure they did want to assess your design skills. Just a hunch.
Yeah, I think I botched the design round. It was my very last round and I had a junior interviewer with a reverse shadow who went on vacation the next day. Neither of us wanted to be there. Still, historically I've done better on design and worse on coding. It also probably doesn't help that the little work I did in that area used AWS/Amazon specific stuff vs open-source/Google cloud stuff
I assume this is Spotify in NYC? I don’t know about Spotify, but financial tech interviews in NYC are super specific. If it’s a .NET shop, the interview will mostly be C# and SQL. They might ask design, but then they’ll frame it around the tech (“so how would you accomplish that <parallel processing> in C#?”). If you really want to drive yourself crazy, do tech interviewing on both the east and the west coast at the same time. I’m doing it now for the second time. You’ll go nuts because you have to prepare for the data structures and algorithms (west coast), AND then suddenly you’ll have to prepare for a super technical C# interview with all exact forms of parallel processing and multithreading, etc., and advanced SQL queries! It’s hell, I can’t pull it off if I’m still working.
Did you write the exact code in the top voted solution from discussions in Leetcode. ? Interviewers get annoyed.
You're not wrong. Some interviewers forget that the point isn't to memorize leetcode. Sadly, it's devolved to that.
Were you interviewing for a data engineering role? Were you asked about Scio? I’m sorry that your HM was so myopic. It’s quite common here, unfortunately.
It was a backend engineering role but it seemed a fair bit of it was data engineering skewed. I don't know what SCIO is but it might be something i was asked in w different way It could also be I'm not being told the full story.
What is scio?
Leetcode will only fool fb
How did you do on case study? How was your hiring manager conversation? That one is really important too.
I think I did well on conversation got the case study done faster than expected.
Count your blessings. Your better off somewhere else.
+1
Why do you say this. Have interview coming up. Will be going on-site but was not convinced.
Ur music taste is not up to the mark
They saw through your leetcode bullshit
I have done exactly zero leetcode or other prep for months going in.
I just wanna day this made me lmao!!!