Just got done with one of the FAANG company's onsite. There were 2 LC mediums(1 with 35% success, another with around 55-60%). I most certainly solved both of coding questions reasonably quickly and there was a sys design question which was also OK, I didnt fall flat on any of the questions. But the unanimous consensus for all interviews was that there were 'gaps' in my technical knowledge and was promptly rejected. They wouldn't elaborate on these 'gaps',( ofcourse I appreciate the recruiter getting back and offering feedback instead of ghosting me). I have been hitting LC hard for quite sometime now. While if I had not known any of the answers or flunked it outright the corrective action is to I guess hit LC/sys design, harder I have no idea how to identify and rectify gaps. Any advice? Also, I have flunked pretty much all non Leetcode style coding rounds. Any advice here would also help. TC 300k #engineering #software #techinterview
I think you need to provide more interview specifics. Also are you going to the hc at all?
For non LC rounds for eg I was asked to implement an excel like spreadsheet with get/set and print N rows. I did a small mistake but recovered and went on to complete the assignment, I dont have the code to show you from any of the instances.. What do you mean hc?
What faang asks that? Fwiw, That problem sometimes has a component where you need to support simple formulas, like the sum of two other cells. That can require more advanced language features like lambas.
I think you just need to give us more. Start with company and yoe. Sometimes this can be a way of folks saying âwe donât like you enoughâ. This can be one person on a committee where you donât have an advocate. But in my opinion this is less common at big tech, but common at startups where everyone has solid pedigrees. If you are interviewing for senior you could not be sending enough âseniorâ signals. This is much more nuanced than reaching an optimal lc solution or not. Hc is hiring committee. Google it. Itâs the difference between being rejected by your interviews or a committee reviewing feedback. Also keep in mind that once you get much above Cisco, the interview bar is extremely high. I know this from failing 6 onsites with tier 2-3 companies before signing with Meraki.
The FAANG company I mentioned is AMZ(@rlDx72 did you guess right?) and I have 14 yoe. I dont think this went to the HC, both coding and sys design, the recruiter mentioned the feedback was similar. What are some of the senior signals do folks look for? More than solving a coding question and coming up with > 1 approaches what else do they look for? Moving forward, I have IVs with Roblox(I am nervous about this one as the role is PE), Clumio and Carta(take home due next week). Any tips on each of the mentioned companies will be much appreciated. Clumio annd Roblox: hows the range of questions like? LC medium, hard? Carta: yet to take up the takehome which at the offset doesnt look hard but I can write an elaborate library for what they as asking, what level of extensibility do they ask for?
I wish I could help you more. I can give you a couple "tips" largely based on my own struggles, but please take them with a grain of salt. Also, please be wary of advice around here. The vast majority of Blinders are quite young and interviewing at different levels. The L6/L7 bar at Amazon is exponentially higher than the lower bars. Most of my advice is not gonna be stuff you can't necessarily fix in a few weeks of interview prep. I'm also gonna skip over behavioral stuff as it doesn't sound like you are getting negative feedback there. I don't have experience at the companies you listed but my guess is that Roblox will be extremely competitive due to the # of applicants they get. The others might be less so. 1. Show extreme proficiency in your language of choice for coding challenges. For example, you should be teaching your interviewer something about the language you chose and leading the interview if you are using a language different from what the company/interviewer defaults to. This is especially true for anything non-leetcody exercises. 2. Show "rhythm" while working through bugs and blocks. I swear I got dinged at Confluent only for taking an extra 2 minutes to find a bug. I also got rejected from a startup because by a kid w. like 4 yoe because I didn't solve a LC medium fast enough--like many interviewers he wanted an excuse to fail me. If your progress is rough or jumpy you can get dinged for not being "senior enough" 3. You need to demonstrate technical depth in systems interviews. Grokking is not enough at your level. You don't need to know everything, but it helps if you can show a depth of knowledge in one area (like databases, multi-datacenter systems, or messaging systems). Being able to demonstrate this is partly luck as not every interview is gonna take you there. Bringing up real-life projects and experience helps. Like being able to describe how Optimistic locking works in different versions of Mongo or something. Or stuff about K8s. Generic knowledge only can get you through it but will not give you high marks and increases your chance of failure. 4. Steering Q&A sessions into technical discussions can be a useful tactic but did not always work for me. For the Carta take home. I probably did something similar for Datadog which I passed. I would focus less on outright extensibility and more on (I realize these are aspects of extensibility) cleanliness, tests, readability, and well-reasoned abstractions. If they give you a time estimate, you should probably increase it by 50-100% and spend that long if you feel relatively strongly about the gig.
Just seeing the word gap, I think I know exactly which company you interviewed for but wonât say it. But Iâm 99% I know. I got similar feedback and then aced two on sites at tier 1s the same week. So keep your head up.
Thanks to all who replied.
Sometimes you did nothing wrong. I've interviewed people that I thought did geat and all it takes is one person to plant a small seed of doubt and the rest of the reviewers are too afraid or lazy (it's usually at like 6pm) to defend the interviewer. Just move on and keep applying.