Interviewing rant: I have been interviewing for the last month onsite at all type of places. (3 a week for the last 3 weeks) This is the first time I really interview in the last 5 years. And over the last month my skills as a real day to day coder went down but my skills at interviewing went up. - I got used to Leetcode style question and recognized the patterns. This is completely useless to my day to day job. - I became more confident and started to care less the more offers I started to get. somehow interviewers love this and the more confident I am the better the offer is. The more you show that you already have plenty of offers, the more they want you. Whenever the recruiter would ask if I have pending offers I would proudly state "without going into details I have a couple pending offers". When you refuse an offer,some employers will try to call you back a couple days after to give you an even higher one. - I started to become super prepared with bullshit at all the behavioral questions. Showing plenty of enthusiasm about everything. Ready to explain an hypothetical conflict with a colleague, and other nonsensical questions - design questions are 90% the same pattern: in memory kv stores. Load balancer, API and DB quick design, scale your servers, scale your DB, how to store big files and big data, how to add metrics to all your system. Your best bet here is to watch some industry best practices at conferences. For example SREcon, where typical architecture are explained. Most of the time interviewers are fine with you saying the buzz words and staying on the superficial level, drawing box style diagrams. - one last thing: It's always easier to get a referral to bootstrap the process as the recruiters will then contact you directly. If you don't have a referral, you can find some team lead on linked in and ping them there. Usually they state there that they are actively hiring. This worked everytime for me. Basically, the more you interview, the better you become at interviewing. This is completely uncorrelated with my actual skills. I seriously think the process is completely broken, and if I had a bit more of self-love I would refuse to take part in this stupid circus. We need to find a better way to handle this as an industry. Seriously.
This is super helpful.
Did you get to the point of whipping out your balls and putting them on the conference room table? 😆 (That’s a reference to an episode of “Silicon Valley”, by the way)
Congrats. What is Tc
Didn't chose yet as I'm still waiting for some results//offers. Probably around 350k , 8yoe. I'm mainly targeting mid sized private companies though
any advice on becoming more confident during the interview? without coming off as a robot or arrogant
That's a difficult one. I would say having other offers and not caring helps a lot. You need to see the itw as a laydback discussion and not as an interview. Don't be stressed!
Where did u get offers from
3 of the faanmgs. Plus a couple other midsized companies.
3 of the “faanmgs” == Amazon, Apple and Microsoft?