Hey folks, I’m seeking career advice. First of all, I don’t come from a CS background, although I did take a few programming courses in college (BS in Electrical Engineering, ‘16). I have held two roles at my company - first one was purely hardware (in verification) and the second one is more software focused (writing command line applications in Java for hardware verification). I would like to pivot into a SWE role in the future, but I don’t want to stay at IBM. If you were in my shoes, what do you think would be the best way to land a SWE role at FAANG and A-list tech companies? I am okay at LC, but I’m a pile of burning garbage at system design. I have read a few chapters of Designing Data Intensive Applications but I don’t feel any more confident in my system design abilities. I have been getting cold messages from Microsoft, Google, and Amazon recruiters on LinkedIn, and have onsites coming up. These will be my first SWE technical onsite interviews and I’m honestly terrified of system design. I understand that there is a good possibility I may bomb these interviews, but I’ve come to terms with my chances. I just want to know, how would someone with my background and limited SWE experience (all command line Java application, no real backend experience) eventually nail system design interviews? Thanks! TC: 105k in Austin TX YoE: 2 in hardware, 1.5 in software
So all interview rounds are just algo/ds?
I've seen multiple people post about system design interviews for basically any level that isn't new college grad level, so it may vary by company.
What my G recruiter told me, is that they use Systems Design round to determine the level of the candidate. If you're Okay with L3/L4, then shouldn't be concerned too much.
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At Google they do not ask system design until L5 (10+ yoe, generally). So just study that leetcode....
According to a comment I saw on another recent blind post, someone interviewing for SWE-SRE L3 at Google got a system design question... does it generally depend on the interviewer? Or in this case, would system design help gauge what level would be given to the new hire?
An actual system design round should not happen at L3. A 5 minute "tell me about the system design of your current project" or something like that could happen perhaps. (Edit: that is for SWE. Not 100% certain what happens for SRE)