Thanks Blind! Sharing my Google L5 (and other) interview experience and giving back to the community! AMA

May 1 30 Comments

(Long post warning!)

Thanks Blind for all the inspiring and motivational posts! I hope to give back to the community by sharing my own personal experience and I hope this can help others who are going through a similar situation.

Current TC: 200k, 7.5 YOE, L63
New TC:
Base 200k
RSU 491k (33/33/22/12 frontloaded vesting)
Signon 50k

Location: Seattle, L5

At the end of last year I was contacted by a Google recruiter and the whole interview process started.

The recruiter was looking for a backend candidate but my work experience is mostly in frontend so I asked for frontend roles. She then said she would connect me with a colleague of hers who has frontend roles. At this point, I thought it was an empty promise, but lo and behold, she connected me with another recruiter after a month or so.

The new recruiter was going to set up a phone screen but then came back to me later and said I could skip directly to virtual onsite because of my interview performance with Google from 1.5 years ago. She also mentioned that I would be put in a loop for L5 because of my YOE. She didn’t ask me about my level at the current job or anything.

During this period, I was simultaneously contacted by a recruiter from Amazon so I was discussing interview schedules with them too. Google was my top choice but I wanted to maximize this opportunity, so I started applying to a few other companies so I could have some competing offers ready in case I get lucky and Google extends an offer. In the end, I had interviews lined up with Google, Amazon, LinkedIn, Meta, TikTok, and Databricks. (Oh yeah, later in the process I got contacted by an EM from CloudKitchens, and also the founder of a startup, so I was like why not? I’m already interviewing so let’s give them a try. Got rejected by CloudKitchens after onsite, and the founder never followed up after our initial call)

1.5 years ago, I had gone through a similar exercise and had applied to ~40 companies and ended up having 11 phone screens and 6 onsite interviews (Google, Meta (Facebook at the time), Qualtrics, Quora, TikTok, and Dropbox), only to get rejected by them all. At that time, I had used PTO for a whole week to do interviews and it really took a toll on my mental as well as physical health, so I thought interviews with ~5 companies were enough this time.

Not knowing exactly how Google’s process works post-onsite, I wanted to put them at the very end so I could practice with other companies, but it didn’t really work out that way and I ended up interviewing with Google first. This actually turned out to be in my favor because of Google’s notoriously slow process. It might be different now with the recent hiring practice changes though.

So I had my onsite interviews with Google in mid February. There were five rounds:
1. Googleyness and Leadership
2. (2 parts) Frontend system design + hands-on coding in HTML/CSS/JS
3. Data structures and algorithms round
4. OOD design + hands-on coding (language wouldn’t have mattered but I used JS)
5. (2 parts) Verbally designing a game, followed by solving it using data structures and algorithms (this turned out to use graph algorithms) + JS trivia

I thought I was ready because I already had experience with Google from 1.5 years ago. But I was kind of caught by surprise because not like the last time, I was asked a lot of questions on leadership experiences during #1 G+L, and almost all rounds seemed to have some element of design except for #3 DSA round. 1.5 years ago, I had done Googleyness (no leadership) + 2 rounds of DSA + 2 rounds of frontend coding but maybe that’s because it was for L4 back then. But thankfully, I had some leadership examples ready because I was also preparing for Amazon’s LP questions.

After finishing all the rounds, I felt I did pretty well. But I had a similarly good feeling 1.5 years ago and I was rejected by the hiring committee at that time so I didn’t want to keep my hopes up.

After Google interviews were done, I had onsite interviews with the other companies in the following weeks. 3 weeks after the Google interviews, I had an offer from Amazon and was waiting for results from LinkedIn but no words from Google. I was getting anxious because Amazon had come back and given me what I thought was a pretty strong offer. I had almost taken the Amazon offer because they made me decide in 2 days and the numbers were pretty strong and I liked the prospects of the team I would join. But I shared this info with the Google recruiter and she got back to me on the last day of Amazon’s deadline with the news that I passed for L5. So I declined Amazon and decided to go with Google (Amazon’s interview experience was really good by the way).

At this point, I was beyond ecstatic because I never expected to crack L5. I was expecting a rejection, or a down-level at best. Little did I know, team matching was another hurdle in and of itself, which almost took 1.5-2 months. I had my first team interested in me the same day I heard I passed the HC and had a call at the end of that week. I was told it would be a casual introductory call, so I treated it as such. But I must have not explained my work experience well enough and the hiring manager didn’t want to proceed. After this call, I didn’t get any call for 3 more weeks and I was getting super worried because of Blind posts saying not matching with a team for some period can invalidate your candidacy. So I started beating myself for not taking the Amazon offer but at the same time tried to do as much as I could to get myself exposed to other Google hiring managers. This process was like a black box so I didn’t know what to do and all I could do was improve my resume with every little detail on all my work experience, and sharing relevant job postings from the Google Careers site. I’m not sure if any of that helped but I had 4 more team matching calls after that and a few teams extended an offer to me.

Now was the time to negotiate. The recruiter asked me for my expectation. By this point, I had heard from LinkedIn that I passed the onsite interview but the team I interviewed for didn’t want me so I was put in team matching. I shared my salary expectation with the LinkedIn recruiter and I knew LinkedIn would offer strong numbers, so I shared that fact with Google and also my Amazon numbers. In hindsight, this might have been a mistake. The compensation team got back to me with a best and final offer and they didn’t match my expectation. I tried to negotiate but because it was ā€œbest and finalā€, I was told canceling the loop with Meta and Databricks, or even sharing a written offer letter from LinkedIn would not help. The recruiter set up a call with the senior director of the org I would join and so I asked him about any room for negotiation but it didn’t work unfortunately. Lesson of the day - don’t share all your info up front. But I really liked the team I was going to join and they showed a lot of enthusiasm for me too so I decided to take the offer and join this team. When I joined Microsoft long ago, I was lowballed hard but I didn’t even negotiate so that was something that was always in the back of my mind haunting me, and I didn’t want to repeat the same mistake. This time, I did all I could (although it didn’t work) so I have no regrets.

So that’s the end of my interview journey this time. Kudos to my Google recruiter. She always answered my emails in a timely manner, unlike some other Blind posts say. No response from the recruiter is one of the worst things that can happen to a candidate. My Amazon recruiter was not very transparent about the level I was going into even when I asked the question 4 times and it left a bit of a sour taste in my mouth, so that’s another small reason for not taking Amazon offer.

In terms of prep, I spent two hours in the morning (6AM-8AM) studying Leetcode with a friend for about two months. Grokking the coding interview on educative.io helped a lot with recognizing interview question patterns, so I highly recommend it (no association with educative.io). My friend also landed a nice job so that was very awesome. In terms of frontend prep, I felt pretty strong about my frontend expertise. 1.5 years ago I did pretty extensive prep and I read a lot of books on javascript fundamentals to understand JS concepts like prototype, closure, array methods, DOM API, etc. and all of that just needed some brushing up. bfe.dev is another great resource for frontend. But honestly, there’s not too many resources for frontend interview prep compared to backend so this looks like a niche market to penetrate if anyone is interested.

Feel free to ask questions and I’ll try to answer as best as I can. If you’re interviewing right now, good luck!

#frontend #interview #prep

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