Tales from the battlefront (interview experiences)

I went through a job change earlier this year and wanted to share my experiences. Hopefully this proves useful to those interviewing, studying, or planning to make a job change soon. YOE: 2 Companies I applied to: Google w/ referral: no interview Facebook w/ referral: E3 offer MS w/ referral: SDE1 offer Intuit w/ referral: Senior offer Amazon: L4 offer Scale AI: SDE2-level offer Toast: SDE2, asked for diff team, was ghosted Uber: goofed OA Verkada: dropped out after phone screen Square: no interview Stripe: no interview Match Group: no interview Snapchat: no interview PDT Partners: no interview Discord: no interview Amazon (AWS) offer was around 250k (160k base, 100k RSU over 4 years, 100k signing over 2 years). I did not negotiate because I didn’t want to move to Seattle and didn’t want to work for Amazon. Scale AI offer was initially 165k base, 15k signing bonus, 400k in options over 4 years (after cost of exercising). After negotiation, offer was 180k base, 60k signing, 600k in options over 4 years (after cost of exercising). I ended up turning this down only because of the paper money aspect. Scale will probably IPO and I will probably have missed out on some nice tendies. But that’s life. Intuit offer was initially around 250k for SDE2. Something like 160/30/16 with 50k signing bonus. After negotiating and pushing to be releveled, offer was 375k+. 185/65/30 with 200k signing bonus over 2 years. MS didn’t give numbers because they were super slow and I had already signing another offer. I suspect it would have been low though. FB didn’t give numbers because I finished the process late relative to others and didn’t have time to go through team match. Wasn’t thrilled about E3 anyway. Interview Prep: systeminterview.com LC (did about 85 problems in all) At first I was very slow and ineffective at solving LC problems. I started with Binary Tree problems and just kept doing them over and over again until I could confidently solve BTree problems. Traversing, root to leaf sums, etc. iteratively and recursively. BFS/DFS. I also went through some of Blind 75. Interview Experience: Facebook phone screen is a sprint. 2 questions is 35 mins. Uber OA is a super sprint. 3 questions in 70 mins. I didn’t get any Graph or DP problems. Quite a few BFS/DFS, and string/array: sliding window, two pointer, etc. MS, Amazon, and FB all asked me to design a LRU cache during the onsite. Negotiations: Be direct. Know your value (you should know what’s a low ball, decent, and good offer for each company). Let the recruiter know you really want to make a deal if you really want the job, and explain your hesitations based on current comp or competing offer comp. General: I think communication is huge huge huge. There are a lot of candidates. Most of them aren’t great communicators. Be kind to everyone you speak to, respond quickly to emails. Hiring Managers don’t just want to hire anyone, they want to hire people they will enjoy having on their team. Be personable, make little jokes and small talk. It goes a LONG way. Old TC: 120 New TC: 375+ YOE: 2