[AMA] Google| FB | Snap | Airbnb | Lyft | Uber | Quora | 7+ Offers | [AMA]
Hi Team,
First of all THANK YOU for such a great community here!!
Blind helped me with a lot of useful information!
This post is to give back to the community.
I recently received 7+ offers for Senior SWE engineer at most of the companies I aimed to get into.
It was a great experience interviewing with each one of them and I am excited about the next chapter in my life.
Feel free to ask any questions that I may be able to help you with.
YOE: ~4-6
Current TC: ~340k (rocketing stock)
Current level: L64
Offers TC: ~410k-580k
TC calculation formula: base + target cash perf bonus+ annual equity+ signon/4
Not counting refreshers, 401ks or other benefits.
Prep strategy:
~3 months of leetcode. Roughly 2 questions per weekday. And on average 10-15 questions per holiday(so Saturdays Sundays and any holidays). No easies. All mediums or hards.
LC count: ~200+ meds ~100 hards
System design:
Engineering blogs of Uber dropbox netflix github twitter
Martin klepman- Designing data intensive applications
Grokking systems design interview(found this one very shallow)
Some topics to focus on:
How is data stored and scaled? Replication and sharding
How is data transferred? Encoding
How is data operated on? Transactions
How is communication and coordination handled? Consensus algos.
A caveat:
Let 'p' be the probability of the event E= getting an offer from XYZ company.
'p' can never be 1.0
However 'p' can be pushed closer to 1.0
1. Add more companies to the event E
2. Prep more. For this step I feel my recommended prep strategy should be good enough but YMMV
Negotiation strategy:
Just used the following two rules:
A. Information is KEY!!
- be aware of how you did in interviews. Ask for feedback on perf. After interview create notes on how you felt about your performance.
- be aware of the usual levels of compensation at the level being offered. Blind+ levels.fyi are good sources. Talk to folks in your network. You should know what's possible and what's not.
B. Have a 'STRONG' goal in mind
What's your goal for negotiation?
Just To get more? It won't work.
Have something strong in your mind as a goal.
This could be a number X below which you won't accept. The information in A helps determine X.
For me %le in comp band was also a signal on how strongly the company wanted me.
A company ready to pay me 99.9%le in order to get me is more attractive than some company paying me just enough to match.
C. BONUS point. Don't make it all about compensation.
For me peers. Culture. Kind of work and mission were critical too.
Decision matrix:
Work: Do I see myself working in that product space for next 10 years?
Engineering culture: balance of development velocity vs perfection.
Company culture: the way recruiter treats you or the compensation committee treats you gives insights into the company culture.
Stay away from companies that low ball hard initially but then on presenting competing offers immediately match.
How did I feel talking to folks who interviewed me?
How passionate did they sound?
Were they happy in their role?
What was motivating them?
Interview difficulty from my experience:(decreasing order of difficulty )
1. Snap and quora.
2. Google.
3. Airbnb FB Uber lyft
All companies had me sign NDAs so I can't discuss the exact questions.
But the general theme of the algo questions asked is around the following:
1. Greedy
2. DP
3. Graphs
-bfs dfs
- dag toposort toporanks
- shortest paths: djikstra bellman ford FW
-articulation points and bridges
- Euler paths
- MST prims and kruskal
- max flow min cut
4. Binary search
5. Stacks
6. Heaps
7. Disjoint set union
Edit: Wow!! Phenomenal response. 30k views 1k comments in <20 hours.
Happy that people are finding the thread helpful.
I have some back to back meetings now and need to catch-up with work. Expect some delays in response to questions. Will respond by end of day .
Edit 2: (12/3/2020)
50k views 1200+ comments! Glad that people found this useful.
Not actively tracking this post anymore, and it's been an overdose of blind for some days, taking a break, expect significant delays in reply.
Edit 3:(12/14/2020)
Glad that people found it helpful. Looks like all questions are covered.Had a good time answering your questions. Unfollowing the post now.
#engineering #software #swe
#interview #leetcode #systemdesign
#negotiation #google #facebook #e5
#sde
Levels.fyi - Compare career levels across companies
comments
Also I would guess you are or were a competitive programmer
- dag toposort toporanks
- shortest paths: djikstra bellman ford FW
-articulation points and bridges
- Euler paths
- MST prims and kruskal
- max flow min cut
Edit: after reading the rest of this thread, OP does competitive programming and put that on his resume, that is why he got questions like this.
Current TC: ~340k
Current level: L64โ
How the fuck
OP drilled into my offer details and intricacies of negotiation, in the guise of offering help. I fell for it, at the end I walked away with nothing & OP had all he/she wanted. Blame me for trusting :D
Flagged by the community.