Thank you Blind! Increased TC by 2.5x

Huge thank you to the Blind community. There's so much useful information here that I'm not sure I could've done it on my own. Hope you find this helpful! Background TC (before) 200k TC (after) 525k 11 YOE (4 years IC, 7 years manager) - mostly in consulting and large financial services companies Canada (HCOL area) Wife + 2 kids About 5 months ago the Big Bank I worked at went through a reorg. Wasn't happy with the changes but I was in what I thought was a nice cushy job (3 years earlier when I joined I got a double-promotion and jumped to 200k TC). A friend reached out to me and he mentioned he was job searching and found this app called Blind. I didn't think much of it until he also sent me a link to levels.fyi for some Canadian comp that were really high (I think it was Shopify EM). That definitely got me interested. Long story short, I decided to send my resume out and see what I could get. I got 3 interviews pretty quickly (Microsoft + 2 unicorns). Recruiter screen was no problem so next was a hiring manager call. I failed all 3 of them. Badly. That's when I realized I needed to actually spend time studying.  When I joined Big Bank I pretty much winged it since a VP I had worked with earlier in my career vouched for me but it obviously wasn't enough this time around. Studying Having 2 kids definitely doesn't help with finding time to study, but I squeezed some time in early morning (1hr) and late night (1-2hr). During the day anytime I wasn't in a meeting I would also study (0-4hr). I put in about 5 weeks of solid studying before sending out new applications. My focus was on 4 main areas (in this order): 1) Behavioral questions 2) System design 3) Previous projects 4) Coding Behavioral questions - created a story bank of about 40 stories, put in as much detail as I could in STAR format. This actually took me a long time to do but I thought it was massively helpful. Some people can just wing it but I found it easier to have everything ready beforehand.  I also created a separate Q&A sheet for common EM questions. Most of these were just linking to the story bank but some of them were bullet point answers (e.g. leadership style, managing over/under performers, approach to cross-functional collaboration, etc.) System design - my weakest area and probably the most important. I relied on Blind to understand how to prep and referenced this post a lot https://www.teamblind.com/post/YA2RKEqY My approach from most useful to least: 1) Grokking the System Design Interview and Grokking the Advanced System Design Interview - only reason so high it gives the standard list of questions asked, but not enough details. I skimmed for breadth and to know what I don't know. 2) System Design Interview An Insider's Guide - thought it was well laid out, especially if you take time to go through referenced footnotes. 3) Designing Data-Intensive Applications - very heavy, but I highly recommend it. This gave me confidence to go deeper in some areas that I might not have before reading it. 4) Gaurav Sen - videos were hit/miss, good for breadth but I found they didn't go deep enough and were too simplified. 5) InfoQ - if I had a lot more time I think this is a goldmine, but I didn't so just chose a few that I thought were interesting to me. 6) Mock interviews - I considered paid mock interviews but didn't go through with it. I did have 1 mock interview with a friend which was helpful even just to get in the right mindset. Previous projects - I chose 2 projects and went through them in detail to summarize tradeoffs, decision points, contentious areas, etc. Found this very helpful to structure my responses as almost every interview loop had a Project Q&A interview. Coding - LeetCode easy/medium. I probably did 40 questions in total. My thinking behind this was if the interview loop needed me to solve a LC hard then probably not the company/role for me. I still code occasionally at work. Interviews In total (ignoring the 50+ applications I spammed out with no response / email rejection) I got to at least a phone interview with 14 companies and received 2 offers (17% success rate...). Failed before final round (mostly with hiring manager): Microsoft Capital One Applyboard No-name tech company #1 No-name tech company #2 Took myself out of interview process after recruiter call: Mozilla Slalom Medium-sized Canadian insurance company Got to final round but rejected: Doordash (EM) - TC range 400-500k CAD (although I feel like I dodged a bullet here. Asked a lot about WLB and got pretty bad vibes overall. Also was the only company to reject me with a standard automated "Thank you for applying" email.) Shopify (senior manager) - TC 300k+ CAD (good interview process except the life story which seemed like it could be too biased. Also gave really strong feedback in the rejection phone call which I used in other interviews.) Square (EM) - TC range 300-350k CAD (best interview process by far and everyone seemed very intelligent, professional, and polished - I really wanted this one.) No-name tech company (director) - TC 200-300k CAD (meh..) Offers: Late-stage startup (senior manager) - TC 250k US e-commerce company - TC 525k I got the late-stage startup pretty early so had to extend it a few times as I had no other offers to use as leverage (I'm not good at lying) even though the TC was not a huge step up. Once I finished the interview loop with the US e-commerce company and was given a verbal offer... I kind of forgot to negotiate after she threw at me all these large numbers. Only consolation for me is I did tell the recruiter I wasn't interested in interviewing because they came so late and I had 5 final rounds coming up (I didn't think I needed them) so they fast-tracked me... and maybe bumped up my offer as well (who knows). The End It seemed like such a long process even though it only took 3 months. The 3 early quick rejections definitely did not help my confidence. But my take-away from all of this is that anything is possible and it's never too late.

Levels.fyi - Compare career levels across companies

Levels.fyi

Giving back - long-term interview preparation strategy - Part 1

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